# Transparent Tiffs?



## dlookus (Mar 24, 2002)

Anyone know how to save out transparent tiff files?
When I save them out in PhotoShop it fills all the transparent parts in with white.
All help is greatly appreciated.


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## evildan (Mar 25, 2002)

Tiffs, as far as I am aware, cannot be transparent. 

You have to save it as a gif.

There may be some way to do it, but I know you can't do it in Classic builds of the program.

Why do you want to save it as a Tiff?

Depending on what you're doing, you might be able to get away with using a clipping path in Photoshop.

I can show you  how to make one, but I want to make sure that would help you out.

Let me know.


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## dlookus (Mar 25, 2002)

Actually, I figured it out. I had to make an alpha channel. What threw me off was that the file I was replacing was a tiff but just opened up in PhotoShop with transparency and no alpha channel. Weird. Anyway, I had to use a tiff, so if anyone else needs to do this, that's how it's done.
Thanks anyway.


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## evildan (Mar 26, 2002)

Never even thought of an alpha channel... still, I don't know if that alpha channel will be read in the program you're attempting to use it in.

What are you using the tiff for? I'm just interested in knowing what you need a transparent Tiff for.


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## dlookus (Mar 26, 2002)

I made myself a new icon for "Fire" (I wasn't too fond of the one that came with it), but since it uses overlays for displaying how many people are online and it has another image for flashing. It had transparent tiffs for those files. I was getting a white box around the icon in the dock. The alphas worked great.

I'll probably send it to them when I get the flames the way I'd like them.

Here's the icon in the dock:


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## marccus (Mar 31, 2008)

Hi, 

I've a mini trick for doing that 

I was using macromedia firework for it, but i think photoshop will do fine as well.

here is how... 

I make the logo save in gif format instead of tiff to get the transparent background. Then, i edit the filename, change the .gif into .tif. Click "use .tif" when there's a msg prompt out. Taa daa~~ your file is done 

Hope this will help u.


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## Natobasso (Apr 2, 2008)

hopefully you're not using a tif on the web? Way too large and not standard practice. Use gif or png.


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## elander (Apr 2, 2008)

marccus said:


> Hi,
> 
> I've a mini trick for doing that
> 
> ...



Changing the file name doesn't alter the file format. It may look like it works, but any application that actually uses the file name to determine how to parse the file will fail.


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