alpha issues bugging me

[mikekantor]

I am making a skin (duh), and I am encountering a problem with the way WA3 handles alpha blending.

At first I thought it was just my eyes or something, but now I'm sure its Winamp. What I have is a little animation with a drop shadow on it, the drop shadow lands on a white background. When WA3 renders the drop shadow as a transparency against the white background on an image under it, the black drop shadow looks grey. So I decided to try blending the shadow and the white background in Photoshop, instead of Winamp, and then see how it would look in Winamp. The result was totally different as you can see in this screenshot:

http://www.mikekantor.com/images/alpha.jpg

You may not be able to see the animation, but you see what I'm talking about.

Is this a beta problem? Seems like an obvious question, but I read somewhere here that alpha stuff inside Winamp (not going through to windows) had been figured out an was basically done.

If it is, then should I just continue developing and hope that everything will look fine later, or should I compensate by making a stronger shadow...?

Anyone else have this problem?

[QHOBBES]

You may not be able to see the animation
Of course we can't, it's a .jpg! Make it into an animated .gif and we
can see the animation!

You're not helping the sterotype that all newbies are dumbass'

[Lucas]

Ok, let's do a recap:

The borders of your skin aren't anti-aliased properly, right?

This problem will be fixed in beta 2.

-L

[mikekantor]

Of course we can't, it's a .jpg! Make it into an animated .gif and we can see the animation!

I did not mean that some people may see it and some wont... there is a "but" in the sentence, which indicates that despite the fact you can't see the animation, you see enough to know what I'm talking about.

The borders of your skin aren't anti-aliased properly, right?
This problem will be fixed in beta 2.

No, it's not the border, it's inside the skin.

[Brennan]

So, it looks like the bottom of the wa3 image is correct, but the top is not? Am I seeing that right?

And you are saving the PNGs from a PSD with no background layer, right?


--Brennan

[Lucas]

Wait, I just had an idea. I had a very similar problem before when I resized my skin background. You should try to close winamp, delete studio.xnf and restart winamp.

Let me know if it works or not.

-L

[lunarboy1]

anti-aliasing against the desktop will be supported in beta 2 for all windows machines??? If thats true then neato! Any progress reports we can drool over Lucas or anybody else?

[mikekantor]

The studio.xnf solution did not work, I already tried that.

The top part of the image is an animation on top of a background, the bottom part is a piece of the background.

On the left, the animation is a transparent PNG tring to blend with the white background of the image under it.
On the right, the animation has it's own white background that was added in photoshop. As you can see, there is a seemless blend between the two, which is what I want the one on the left to do.

I thought it might be a blending setting in Photoshop for the the drop shadow, but that wasn't it either.

[lordkhan]

i can't give you an definite answer but i would assume these problems, along with other issues related to alpha blending through to windows are still being worked on. is there any chance you were reading about beta2?

*cries more about current public status of wa3*

[Lucas]

Originally posted by mikekantor
The top part of the image is an animation on top of a background, the bottom part is a piece of the background.

On the left, the animation is a transparent PNG tring to blend with the white background of the image under it.
On the right, the animation has it's own white background that was added in photoshop. As you can see, there is a seemless blend between the two, which is what I want the one on the left to do.
Look carefully if the width and height of your images are good in your XML. Because if you told Winamp to stretch your layers that's why it's doing weird artifacts. That's the last thing I can think of.

-L

[mikekantor]

The "w", "h", "x", and "y" are all correct.

I checked them, but if they were not correct then the image on the right would not display correctly

[Brennan]

Hmmm, the best way for us to debug something like this is to have an example to work with. Can you make an ultra-tiny skin that displays this problem for us? Otherwise we have to guess stuff and it looks like we're out of guesses.

(Or you can send the whole skin. We won't share it around if you don't want.)


--Brennan

[mikekantor]

Nevermind on the entire post. I found the problem.

Don't use the "Help > Export Transparent Image..." function in Photoshop 6, that is what screwed up the alpha.

[Gonzotek]

Aha! I was recommending that to new skinners, as I myself am a new skinner and that was how I figured out how to get a trans. png out to Winamp. I knew that there had to be disadvantages to using a Wizard to do my work for me, I just couldn't see any. Now I know what they are(distortion at edges).


Since my stumblings with my first skin I've gotten a lot more expereince in PS and am capapble of saving trans. pngs without the Wizard, but at least now I know not to recommend that to anyone else.

Thanks and I look forward to seeing your skin when it's ready.
-=Gonzotek=-

[Lucas]

Originally posted by mikekantor
Nevermind on the entire post. I found the problem.

Don't use the "Help > Export Transparent Image..." function in Photoshop 6, that is what screwed up the alpha.

I'll take note of that.

-L

[Brennan]

Huh? Why didn't you just save a copy to PNG? In 6.x at least it works perfectly (for me).


--Brennan

[mikekantor]

Well that's what I do now, just save a copy.

I posted this in an Adobe.com Photoshop board, so maybe I'll get some answers, but I think it happens when the wizard executes the "Flatten Image" command, thats when the alpha gets messed up.