To get a good alpha channel for P4, the best way is to set the background to some color -- ANY color! -- that is NOT part of the image itself (strange shades of green, pink, or blue seem to work best). In PSP6, I find I often have to Invert the Alpha channel to get a good mask (for some reason, it reads about 3 out of 4 images backwards when I ask to mask the Alpha Channel). I don't know if this will help...