making paa with photoshop CS2

[Seven]

First of all, if this is not the correct place to put this, my excuses

Here's what I have:
I make my transparant design in photoshop and save it; open it up in paint shop pro because I dunno how to save my transparant selection into an alpha channel with photoshop.  From paintshop I save to TGA 24 bit & then reopen in photoshop to be able to save it as 32 bit & then convert to paa.
Now the selection is not so nice in paintshop so I want to do the complete thing in photoshop...

In short:
can somebody tell me how to save my selection to an alphachannel in photoshop or whatever I need to do to get a correct TGA to convert to paa without using multiple programs

Thx very much! 

[bedges]

short tute:

create your image (pic1)


then select the transparency (select/load selection/layer 1 transparency). then switch to your channel palette. create a new channel (pic2)



it will be called alpha1 by default. fill the selection with pure white (edit/fill.../100% white).
the white bits are what will show up, the black bits are what will be transparent. (pic3)



save your file as a 32-bit tga and convert it as normal using texview or whatever.

even if you have gradients of transparency this will work. just remember that when you create your alpha layer, the white bits are what will show up, the black bits are what will be transparent. the grey bits will be transitions between the two.

[Planck]

Nice...

However I can manage to do it all in PSP, you don't need to use more than one program.

No need to save as 24 bit in PSP and then as 32 bit in Photoshop.

24 bits is fine from PSP because....24 bits plus alpha channel = 32 bits, the alpha is 8 bits, 24 + 8 = 32.


Planck

[Seven]

Thx a lot Bedges!
Works as a charm 

And thx Planck for the explonation, makes a lot of sence!
Still I prefer to work in PhotoShop so this is what I needed