Photoshop v7 And Alpha Channels

[Black Magic]

I know that Paintshop is better and I've read this many a time on these forums but I don't have it and will have to make do with what i got, which is Photoshop. I've worked out how to designate Alpha Channels, it's just when it comes to saving, things aren't working to my liking. So, does anyone know how to save a texture with Alpha Channels remaining in tact using Photshop. See when you goto save, there is an option, preserve Alpha Channels, but I am permitted to only use this when saving as a Photoshop specific file format - not tga.

All help, much appreciated.

[SelectThis]

I use Photoshop 6, no problems with alphas.
What I do is make the alpha channel in the channels tab, then save as tga, 32 bit with alpha channel.

Ensure that the right layers are showing and/or use flatten layers to bring the textures down to one layer before saving (backup as a psd before hand)

SelectThis

[Black Magic]

Grr! Don't you hate when you type something here and then after you decide to post you get something like "paa files cannot be attached" only to click back and see your entire message is gone!

Ah well. When I goto save the TGA as 32 bit I get an option to RLE Compress. Should I be doing this or not? I can save the TGA with Alpha Channels preserved, or so I think, because when I open it and run my cursor over the designated Alpha Chan area it disappears. But when I convert to paa (which I've attached below) and load up my addon, I get a solid black texture. Am I missing something here?

Also, I'm not quite sure I follow you on, "make sure that the right layers are showing" and when I tried to flatten I got a completely black image. Sorry about this, only just got Photoshop. Thanks for the help so far.

[rom]

In PS7 the way the alpha channels of a tga image was saved changed.

With PS7.0 the transparency of your base layer is used as alpha channel and not the alpha channel in the channel tab like in previous versions.

This is fixed with the 7.0.1 Update that you get from adobe.
There is also a Targa plug-in available from adobe that fixes this also without updating to 7.0.1