pict w/ alpha

matte

Registered
A friend of mine is coding an app that I designed, and it is now carbonized and working great. The only problem is that pict files do not work with their alpha channels. I converted the pict to a tiff, and the alpha is working fine. I noticed that the Grab utility only saves tiffs. Is this a current limitation in the beta?
 
It seems as if TIFF is the basic graphic format for the system ... i'm assuming that's because it supports alpha channels etc., which i'm not sure that the pict format does. Also, I was able to place a native Photoshop format file as my desktop - weird! Graphics support in this release is great - but why does everything have to take so long to load up? I actually have to wait for my CD player or Preview app to open - these are so small, they should just "be there." I know i've "only" got a B&W G3 350, 128ram, but still....

thedbp
 
Originally posted by thedbp
It seems as if TIFF is the basic graphic format for the system ... i'm assuming that's because it supports alpha channels etc., which i'm not sure that the pict format does. Also, I was able to place a native Photoshop format file as my desktop - weird! Graphics support in this release is great - but why does everything have to take so long to load up? I actually have to wait for my CD player or Preview app to open - these are so small, they should just "be there." I know i've "only" got a B&W G3 350, 128ram, but still....

thedbp

pict format does support 32 bit graphics. 24 bit + 8 bit alpha channel.

supposedly the new dev release of OSX Beta is supper snappy. optimized, fast and lots of fixed gui bugs.
 
Sorry, I look like intruding in a conversation not meant for me. I just wonder what exactly Alpha channel is. The only time I saw something about that is with a theme created for Audion. It allowed transparency. Now, the option to display using alpha channel seems to not work anymore using OS X. Is there a reason?

Just wanting to develop my knowledge, thanks!

 
in all likeli-hood there is no option for it, cuz it's always on in OSX... :)

perhaps a benefit of aqua and app packages is system level suport for stuff like that? :D

the 8bits of the alpha channels is made up of a possible 256 shades of grey... with black as transparent areas and white as opaque... (check yer photshop palettes)

make sense? with OS9... audion's alpha channels lay in PICT Resources (128-135? --been awhile since i made a skin for audion)... In osx, they are probably seperate pict or tiff files in the app's .pkg...

right?

just a theory.
 

I was wondering if anyone could tell me where to find a list of functions for accessing pixels in TIFF images. Basically I only need to be able to read out single pixel values in a C program, but I am totally clueless in terms of what functions to use / where to get them.

This must be a very common thing to need to do, so hopefully someone has an easy answer for me!

I have dev tools loaded, but was unable to find anything there besides manipulating entire pictures, not probing them at the pixel level.

There is libtiff, but I am not sure if that is the most efficient thing to use.

Thanks,
Ben
 
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