did you know if you save your render as a png that it will not save the back ground So you wont have to do all that work to get rid of the back ground in photoshop/paintshop when you want to save your v3 to a ready made image you have in Photoshop/paintshop Tip of the day Save as png when you want to add your render to a back ground Hugz

Good tip Bobbie - thanks for posting :)

You can use the tiff format for the same purpose... wich is better?

Actually I learned that when I WANTED to see the background, and it did not show.

I prefer PNG, myself, for the compression option, but I've heard some people say TIFF has better colour.

hmm..most of the TIFF files I've seen are huge tracts 'o land,..;) say 16 meg for a full screen. But then that's a professional standard. I usually save things as jpgs, because I'm lossy enough..;) still, whatever floats yer boat..

"Huge tracts 'o land..." Haven't heard that in ages! How about a TIFF render of Princess Lucky at some stage, then?

It's to do with Alpha channels, I never use a background in Poser now. I always save as png, add my background in PS7 and re-save as jpg for uploading. The background photo is used for the lighting in the poser scene as IBL also! thefixer, poser coord.

I always save in photoshop format. You can then use the alpha channel to make the background transparent... But i don't really know which one is better.

Yep. I learned that when I first started in poser because I wanted to make "tubes" for my PSP resource site and I figured there had to be a better way to do that than having to render and "tube" the images myself. I prefer .png saves, but I know others who use TIFF and load from the alpha channel to get rid of the backgroung. PNG is the same thing, only you don't have to do the alpha channel step to get rid of the background. Also, another tip is once you do your post work and want to resave it as a .png, don't just press "save". Use the "Export PNG" feature of your program. It saves it with an alpha channel but it also compresses the file size down without losing image quality. A great way to save website space if you offer Poser images for graphic use.

PNG format is a Lossy compression scheme, TIF is non lossy, no compression. In real words, that means that png literally destroys parts of the image, while tif does not. They are comparable to the difference between jpg and bmp. Png, in most (but not all) cases, is set up to blend pixels as it compresses, so you can get some color shifts int he process. Like any good compression scheme, it does its best to remove information that isn't critical and that usually wouldn't be noticed. There is a great deal of subjective decisions making that goes into that, and that's why some people prefer a lossless image with alpha channel such as tiff to the png format. Tif's are large becuase they don't throw any information away.

I was recently told that png uses zip compression.. And as such it should be potentially lossless, as it compresses/uncompresses on the fly. Now I'm not sure.. I always save as tiff to get the alpha channel. Not png and not psd, though I do use them mainly in PS. Tiff works (as far as I know) on both PC, Mac and Linux.

Attached Link: http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngintro.html

see we all learn so much each day to all cool posting

You can save .png with alpha channel. I do all the time when I use "Export PNG Optimizer", it saves with a transparent alpha channel.

Quote - "Since PNG's compression is fully lossless--and since it supports up to 48-bit truecolor or 16-bit grayscale--saving, restoring and re-saving an image will not degrade its quality, unlike standard JPEG (even at its highest quality settings)."...

Yeppers.

yeah, you can apparently set up pngs to be lossy, but i don't know of any app that does...

" I was recently told that png uses zip compression.. And as such it should be potentially lossless, as it compresses/uncompresses on the fly." The compression by itself is loseless, but the RGBA information is combined, so I don't know if the process is 100% reversible or something is really lost.

Something that P6 does, sometimes, that many may not know, is export TIFF files with corrupted channels. Because of this, the PNG option may indeed be the best.

A related tip is to render your png image OVER the background you want to use-- THEN save your render as a png file. Render the same size as the background you wish to use. This way you can 'turn on' anti-alising. The alias'd edges are a very small area in comparision the the rest of the image. And it makes the colors blend better. And eliminates that sharp and jaged appearance and blends in with matching colors.