JIM BURTON mentioned a few posts back about getting white edges round your images. Here's how to get rid of that using Photoshop. [BEFOREHAND: Render your poser figure against the standard grey background or some other solid color that you will key against] In P'Shop 1) Use the Magec wand and select all of the background. Start with a tolerance setting of 10 and increase it as necessary. Zoom into your edges and make sure you are getting all the "edge bumpies" 2) under the SELECT MENU: Invert the selection. 3) under the SELECT MENU:MODIFY:CONTRACT... contract the selection by 1 (2 if your image is really really big) 4) under the SELECT MENU: FEATHER... feather the selection by 1 (2 if your image is really really big) Copy that image and paste it onto the background of your choice. or save the final selection as an alpha for future processing. coolness jje

Very nice technique there jje. BTW Poser creates an alpha channel in both tif and psd formats which might save you a couple of steps. Paul

Allie, Paul--I have to try that. I use a similar method to above in PSP6. You've mentioned before that saving as a tif will give me an alpha channel--seems that I must have not really had that sink in. Sure would be a time saver-will def. try that next time. Diane B

heya; if you have anti-aliasing, the mask poser renders might be a tad 'loose' and cause white lines. i has this problem in ray dream renders til i turned that off. i dont think poser does that, though. if it DOES, 'shop has something under the layers menu called 'remove white matte,' 'remove black matte,' and 'defringe,' which will help you automatically eliminate the weird edges.

If your background is either black or white, then Photoshop will also remove the edge with the "remove matte" command. But it's better to avoid it completely with a format that supports the alpha channel.

You are right using the alpha channel does eliminate the need for the magic brush stage. But I've found that a lot of times I feel the alpha channel edge is too hard against what I am pasting onto. By contracting into the selected area then feathering out, images lay down on to my backgrounds better. jje

jje- Gee, I'm lost here- I was talking about the faint lines you get on the side of the figure (where the front and back projections meet on the map). Are we talking about the same thing? I fix them by fixing the map.

heh heh heh yer rite, I misunderstood. I had visions of bad matte plums dancing in my head gotta lay off that egg nog

But--glad this thread came about anyhow. I had vaguely remembered Allie talking about saving as .tifs and selecting from alpha channel in PS and PSP, but it had sort of slipped over my head. I've now tried it and its a real timesaver, so even if this was a thread not meant to be--I learned something from it S. Diane B