Tiled images are acting odd (Alpha Channel seems to be problem)

Still working on the project that is giving me all sorts of...learning exercizes. (see http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=463667&tstart=0)
I thought I had everything worked out, but am having the oddest problem lately. When I put the image together, things look great until 3/4 of the pieces are in place...then all of a sudden a portion of one picture will appear in a band in another picture). Here's what I've done:
I used ImageReady to divide the image (exported from the original footage via Quicktime in a variety of ways...interlaced and then deinterlaced in Photoshop...progressive...) into 25 pieces (5X5 grid). I imported the 25 pieces into Motion and changed the pixel aspect ratio to NTSC D1/DV (I also tried doing it w/Square pixels) and placed the pieces one by one into a standard NTSC DV Motion project. Problem is, as I said, out of the blue the image will shift.
I've tried all sorts of things and they all kind of work. If I change the alpha channel it will work...for a while. If I change the field order it will work...for a while. And when I say 'for a while' I mean it will look like it's all fixed...and then out of the blue WHAM! I'll adjust the settings of one of the pieces to something that has worked before and it will go crazy again.
Basically, the only way I've been able to get it to work is to change some of the pieces to Field Order lower (and change the Field Order of the project to "none") but not all of them. If I do it kind of randomly to pieces that are not working, it seems to be fine.
Any idea what is causing this???

The final image (and the project) are both 720X480. Same as the raw footage. (although....when I open the raw footage into Quicktime, it seems to be square pixels, as it is wider than the 720X480 movie that I'm linking to you here: I uploaded a .mov version of the Motion project, which just got done being processed/imported into DVDSP).
http://www.jonathanfrank.com/intro2.mov
Here's the weird thing...it looked fine in Motion! I re-created it from scratch and it seemed to work fine. I exported via Quicktime the images (used Animation setting, as it seemed to give a clearer shot). I opened the images in Photoshop, reset the Pixel Aspect Ratio to .9 (DV), cut and pasted the image to a new Photoshop document/image (the NTSC DV Menu template), exported the image into ImageReady, sliced it into a 5X5 grid, Save Optimized it as png images, imported the images into Motion, set the Pixel Aspect Ratio to .9 again (for some reason ImageReady seems to have deleted that step), and re-created the project.
And it seemed to work. I didn't get any of the 'banding' or 'sending some of column A to column B' that I did when creating it before. Everything seemed to work (except for when I cut and pasted the background Replicator from the old project to the new to save time...then I got the weird effects...which vanished when I reverted to the saved older version and didn't occur again when I inserted the Replicator into the layer from scratch).
The field ratio of the images I kept at 'none.' the field ratio of the project is "lower" (I have played with other settings previously, and making them match didn't do anything...and since it was seeming to work this time, i didn't want to mess with anything that didn't seem broken). BIt depth is 8. Frame rate on the project is 29.97, and it reads 30 on the Media tab for the images (once again, since it appeared to be working...)
Just played it in Motion and it still seems to be working (plays very slowly but I got through the first series of images w/o problems).
Might try to export it from Motion in the morning (but importing the problem one into FCP showed the same problems, even before rendering).
But if you have any suggestions...
IMac G5 Mac OS X (10.4.2)

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Automation: Howto swap two areas in one Alpha Channel

Dear Forum members,
another question. I have an Image with some alpha channels. In my automation plugin i need to exchange two areas in one alpha channel. At the moment i'm trying to cut one area, move the other area to the place of the first and then paste the first area at the location of the second one. Is this the optimum way of doing? Or is there something smarter / faster ?
Regards, Christof

For the moment (because i'm too lazy to extend my hidden plugin right now) i've realized it from the automation plugin without any additional channels: Cut area 1, move area 2 to area 1, paste area 1 at the position of area 2. This should also be pretty fast, because Photoshop is doing all the work for me.

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Say it aint so. This is a very crucial feature of the app for my company.

While presenting from an iOS device is certainly useful, I want to be able to do the best presentations possible. Looks like Keynote 5.3 will be the tool of choice for some time yet.
Keynote 6, while a step forward for maybe 99% of users (that don't want to care about what works and what doesn't on various platforms), is a major leap backwards for the professional presentation business.
Time for Apple - or perhaps better yet, some third party - to make a Keynote Pro and make it desktop only, if that's what it takes. Bring back the larger choice of transitions, support for QuickTime alpha channels and dynamic Quartz Compositions, interaction with master slide objects and mixing of themes in the same presentation. And don't stop there:
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Hi,
I have this FLA with animation and when played, the animation has alpha channel. I can’t understand why when I look in the library I see the frames without the alpha channel and also when I try to export/extract the image again the image don’t have alpha channel.
How is it that in flash this image has alpha channel and how to get it out like that into PNG?
Here is the link to download the FLA:
http://download759.mediafire.com/nb749r29220g/e0636ab0ru6ouoa/Untitled-1.fla

"when played, the animation has alpha channel"
how are you playing the animation? control/enter in Flash, Publishing to a Web page or what?
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What is the aniimation? a series of images, one image moving? Are teweens imvolved?
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How are you exporting the image? is it a single image? or a series of frames that makes up an animation?
What was the file format of the original image? you brought that image into Flash and animated it? Now you want to export as a .png with transparency?
Have you ever tried to export a simple .png before so that you see and understand the dialog box that pops up during export? are you chosing "24 bit with alpha channel" in the "Colors" choice?
For those of us who may not want to download your file, please provide a more detailed describtion of everything related to this question.
Best wishes,
Adninjastrator

BufferedImage from PNG : Alpha Channel disregaurded

I'm trying to load a PNG with an alpha channel into a BufferedImage, and
then sample the BufferedImage at various pixels for some operations.
However, the alpha channel seems to get lost upon creation of the BufferedImage.
For example, I'm using a PNG that is 100% transparent, and when I
load it into a BufferedImage and display it on a panel all I see is the panel's background color.
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import java.awt.*;
import java.io.*;
import javax.imageio.*;
import java.awt.image.*;
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}Edited by: robbie.26 on May 20, 2010 4:26 PM
Edited by: robbie.26 on May 20, 2010 4:26 PM
Edited by: robbie.26 on May 20, 2010 4:29 PM

Here ya go robbie, ti seems to work for the rest of the world, but not for you:
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import java.awt.image.*;
import java.net.URL;
import javax.swing.*;
import javax.imageio.*;
public class JTransPix{
JTransPix(){
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public static void main(String[] args) {
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}Please notice how the BufferedImage is declared and set to NULL, then allow ImageIO to set the type--Just as I said before. If you have any question about the PNG producing an ARGB image with ImageIO, then change the color painted onto the backgroun din the paintComponent to what ever you want and you'll see it show through.
BTW: even in the short nobrainers--you still need to have VALID CATCH BLOCKS.
To get what you are looking for, you can mask off the Alpha component by dividing each getRGB by 16777216 (256^3) or do a binary shift right 24 places.

How should I edit an alpha channel after saving?

I have a series of files in which I improperly modified the selection set prior to saving the selection, and now around the intended viewable area there is a hazy artifact that seems to correspond to where I manually edited the selection using Quick Mask (prior to saving).
In other words, within the area of the alpha channel that should be invisible, there is actually a visible, unwanted grey-ish artifact, and I think it's related to how I was using the brush to edit the selection in Quick Mask before saving.
Now I am unable to edit the alpha channel, although Adobe's own website says that in order to edit an alpha channel, all I need to do is select the alpha channel (which I am doing) and then paint at 100% black or white with a brush to either include or exclude parts of selection set.
When I choose the brush and start painting at 100% black or white, nothing happens and I can't figure out what is happening.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
The exact steps that I'm taking are below:
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CLARIFICATION:
I actually am able to "edit" the alpha channel HOWEVER I cannot remove the hazy artifact. I can use 100% black or white to remove the pink/light red areas on either the actual alpha channel (in the Channels area) or as it appears in Layers, but I cannot remove the areas that are grey-ish (well I can paint them white but I can't paint them black, i.e. fully pink).
A teacher showed me a quick fix process that basically involves activating the alpha channel, inverting the selection, and then deleting everything outside of the alpha channel, and then resaving the file. That worked at one point, but now that quick fix is not working either (I am just ending up with a completely visible, white space around the intended visible area, rather than an invsible area).
EDIT (07:22 3.20.13) Also, if you look at what Photoshop is registering as the actual alpha channle, it doesn't match with what I'm seeing above, that is the black and white alpha channel appears to be as expected, and there is not the weird distortion that I'm seeing above in the pink/grey image.
So I am super confused and would appreciate any help!

I greatly appreciate your help with this.
However, after adjustting the black from 99 to 100%, and double checking that the white is fully zero (right now I can't find any files with the white set to anything but "0," so I don't know why some of my screenshots showed that), I am still unable to use black to contract a selection, or white to erase unwanted areas of the alpha channel (this specific post's problem).
So, I'm completely baffeled and am wondering if there is anything else that could be accounting for these results (i.e. the black and white paint not producing the expected results).
Thanks again,
dk
EDIT:
I attempted to make another alpha channel, this time without any manual adjustment of selection via the paint brush. Instead, I used the selection modification option of Contract and used it to contract the selection.
SAME problem. The area that I contracted using Contract, (never painted), is once again displaying a slight grey artifact in the area that is supposed to be completely transparent.

Slightly distorted aspect-ratio (and missing alpha channel) when copy/paste from Photoshop

Maybe this is an old topic (but I didn't find anything on google or this forum):
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I'm on windows7 with CS5.5 and transparency and size are copied over just fine. You answered what would be my first question, 72dpi. How about the image mode. Are you using RGB 8bit?
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Thank you in advance,
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Is there a simple way to add an alpha channel to an
existing BufferedImage?Not for the general case. For example, I used ImageIO.read to load in a jpeg image. It's 50x60 pixels, and as an image it has 3 channels: red, green and blue -- no alpha. The pixel data is stored in a DataBufferByte, which has a single array of 9,000 bytes (3 channels x W x H). Given the packed structure of that data, there is no efficient way to slide in alpha values -- there's no room.
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Or does anyone have a better solution?
P.S. Currently I intend to use a single circle at each
edge, either inside the piece as a hole or filled
outside the edge. These circles can easily be drawn,
but I plan to eventually expand this to be able to
make arbitrarily shaped pieces.1. The code given above is sufficient to take the original image and create the same image, but with an alpha channel. Don't worry about the fact that you're copying pixel data. Are you generating 100 jigsaw puzzles per second?
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b. Just once, for each of these piece images, using a clipping shape, draw from the original image (with or without alpha) onto the piece image to generate the image of one piece. If your jigsaw game allows pieces to be rotated 90/180/270 degrees you may want to pre-generate those rotated piece images to speed up drawing the pieces in rotated orientations. Again, one should do it both ways and compare the results.
--Nax

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Cheers!

Esdebon,
Thanks for the reply.
No, the movieclip has a transparent background.
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http://alt-web.com/gallery.shtml
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www.alt-web.com/
www.twitter.com/altweb

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Hello,
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I try to create a PDF so I create an XObject for my RGB samples, I add a soft mask for the Alpha stream and associate this Alpha with my main XObject.
When it's premultiplied I add a /Matte array for this soft mask but in this case I expected not to add one but without I get completely wrong output so I added it.
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Tiled images are acting odd (Alpha Channel seems to be problem)

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