is it possible to render with shadows but have no background?

Poser will always put some background color in there. However, it is a solid color; it is easily selected within PhotoShop or a similar editing program to be replaced with the content of your choice -- or make into the alpha mask of a transparency.

If you save your image as either a .png or .tif file, then an alpha channel is automatically included for you, which you can then use to remove the backgroun in your image-processing software of choice.

jonthecelt

okay, well i am saving as a tiff and i have ps/cs2 but when i go to the channels layer all i'm seeing is rgb channels....no alpha! is this something i have to setup in poser render? also, when i opened the tiff in ps it asked if i wanted it to correct color to rgb...i said no. is this what i want?

ahhhh, that was it. convert to rgb and the alpha channel is right there. thanks all.

I guess the question is, what is your ultimate goal? Are you trying to make a stamp, or a graphic with a transparent background, that you can use on a web page or something? Or are you trying to put a custom background into a rendered Poser image? Or do you not like the default background color and since you can't decide what color to use, you'd prefer "none?"

rgb should still have the alpha channel (need to save with millions of colors set to ON in other programs)

remember being able to deselect world/background when exporting in P6

If your background colour in Poser is grey and you save as a png then your background will be transparent in any 2D package like photoshop etc. No big problem!

Anad another thing, don't forget you can render the image without shadows and save as png, then render the shadows only and save as png. You can then composite the 2 in PS and add the background of your choice!

This is really good because with the shadows as a seperate layer you can adjust them in any way you want without affecting your colour image!

Once done just flatten layers, save as a jpg or whatever and there's your completed image.

that would help. Like an idjit, I posed my character in Poser, took him to Bryce, set up shadows, and then couldn't get a good angle to show the shadows..;) was going to save with the camera just in front of the character (but behind the shadow), to get that in there..the things I come up with..;)