view alpha channel to edit

[justspeeding]

I tested paint.net in combinatie with alpha channel plugin and when i create a grayscale image and copy it to alpha it works great.

But ones i saved the file, i can't edit just the alpha channel anymore.( i saved the file whit alpha and it's works perfect and when i open it the alpha is visble)

But i can't see the channel layer somewhere.  so is there a way to view the alpha layer .

thx

Edited April 24, 2019 by justspeeding

[toe_head2001]

Are you saying the alpha channel becomes opaque when you save the image file?

Are you saving in the PNG format?

[justspeeding]

The saved file is working correctly. 

For a better explain. I have a tiff file that have transparency saved. I open it in paint.net and then the transparency is ok . But I want t change or edit the transparency. I don't want to start from scratch . Hope there is a way.  In photoshop or gimp you can see the grayscale alpha layers. 

Edited April 25, 2019 by justspeeding

[HyReZ]

There is a thing as layered TIFF files, but Paint.NET does not support layered TIFF containers, Photoshop and GIMP do!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIFF
I always save as a PDN file first then save as the merged layer TIFF second!
If I want to alter my image I can go back a re-work the PDN files.
BTW:
I also save iterations of the work as PDN files as it progresses and give the files names such as 'filename_01.pdn, filename.02, and so on,

that way I can even go back to earlier iterations and even insert layers from later interations.

I have Terabytes of storage and I like to backup often for peace of mind!
I had a system crash after installing Windows 1903 Insider's Update. The system would not repair nor restore! It was a good thing that I had my hard drive backed up also!

Edited April 25, 2019 by HyReZ

[justspeeding]

Thx I do it also like this. Just was thinking I missed something. And also if you download a transparency file then you need to start

Again from zero. 

[HyReZ]

On 4/25/2019 at 9:02 AM, justspeeding said:

 And also if you download a transparency file then you need to start Again from zero. 

I am not understading this statement above.

I download PNG and TIFF with images with some transparency on a regular bases and have no trouble working with them.

If you mean that you have multi-layered TIFFs that you want to use in Paint.NET and can't, you can open and save them

in another image editor and resave in a format that Paint.NET has a filetype plugin which can be use to open.

Edited April 26, 2019 by HyReZ
inserting additional information

[Reptillian]

On 4/25/2019 at 7:21 AM, HyReZ said:

There is a thing as layered TIFF files, but Paint.NET does not support layered TIFF containers, Photoshop and GIMP do!

 

To my knowledge, Affinity doesn't support it. Krita also do support layered TIFF. I guess one improvement for PDN would be to support Layered TIFF.

 

For multi-layer formats and program interchange, 2 options :

PSD

ORA

 

ORA could be the next viable format after some time Krita 4.2 comes out because ORA is impacted by GIMP and Krita development, and Krita 4.2 supports all the modes PDN does. But, that's assuming ORA format specification will follow suit, and GIMP implements those missing modes. I don't remember, but I don't think GIMP supports XOR, Reflect, or Glow yet.

Edited April 26, 2019 by Reptillian

[HyReZ]

I heard that many multi-layer TIFF are actually PSD files in a TIFF container and just changing the file extension from TIFF to PSD is all that is needed to open it with layers intact.

I have no layered TIFFs to test this information.

Edited April 27, 2019 by HyReZ