In Poser 5 I used to save a rendered figure over a background image as a .psd and then open it in photoshop, click select, then load selection and then drag the figure onto a background in photoshop. Now that I have Poser 6 when I go thru the exact same procedure it drags the whole image or at least more than just the figure over the photoshop background. I have found that if I render over grey (I would prefer to render over the entire scene)and save as a png I can drag the figure as an alpha channel over the new background in Photoshop. It was less trouble in P5 to render the entire scene and save as a psd. Is there any way I can do that or has P6 just made my life more difficult? Does anyone know what changed in P6 that does not allow the previous procedure? Lance

Message edited on: 10/16/2005 22:06

No idea... I save all my files as +.psd to re-work in Photoshop and I dont found any differences between Poser 5 and 6...

Save as TIFF, you'll have the alpha channel in the channels palette in Photoshop.

Here is the message from Curious Labs Tech Support that basically says that P6 can't do it like I could in P5.
"Dear Mr. Hendricks,
Unfortunately, at the moment the only way to render out an image with a transparent background in Poser 6 is to choose Render Over Black in the Render Settings, then save the rendered image as a PNG file. We apologize for the inconvenience."

Lance

Message edited on: 10/18/2005 23:12

O_o ... my Poser6 is a mutant one??? I swear. My last render had a Vicky2 and a photo as background. Rendered in Firefly. Exported as *.psd. And... I had in Photoshop7 my nice pic with an alpha which contents ONLY THE CHARACTER

Why not just save the poser render as a .png file? That way you don't have a background and don't have to worry about dragging it or deleting it or having to access an alpha channel to get rid of the background.

What I can't seem to grasp with this thread is if you are going to transpose the figure from your rendered image to another background - why would you render it with a background image in the first place? When I am making promo images for the market place I simply render over a black background and save as png then transpose the character from the png to whatever background I am using for the promo images.

Well... a reason for render with background would be to fake DoF, for example. You have a pic with your character and background, and in photoshop your select the alpha channel, invert selection and apply gaussian blurr with value 2 or 3 But if you want to use a different background, better to render without image

But doesn't Poser 6 has DoF anyway?

Yes, but... I think you need a supermachine... If firefly with ILB and AO spends a whole life in each render, DoF I suppose you need several of your next re-incarnations for a single pic ... at least in my computer

For tastigers question: Sometimes I do a lot of quick renders in a series and then later go back and tweak the figure and background in Photoshop for just the best ones (comes from my photography background) For this reason I save one render as a jpg and another as a psd in case I want to go back and fix it up. I like to do renders on a larger scale but unfortunately Poser causes a lot of pixelation of the backgrounds in the large renders. For this reason I have used the P4 render engine because it is fast. That worked very well in P5 but does not work in P6. So my current workaround is to save a quick render jpg (with pixelated background) and another as a png in case I want to take the time to make a really nice scene in photoshop over a nice 5MP photo background.