I'm pulling my hair out here and I was wondering if anybody here can help me. I'm much to unattractive to be bald as well :-D

I'm using GraphicsGale to draw some simple tiles for a little 2D project I'm working on and exporting them as PNGs.

Everything is going like a dream programming wise but I can't for the life of me figure out how to get GraphicsGale to export the PNG with a transparent colour so I can layer sprites over each other.

I'm not sure if it's something I'm doing wrong with the SpriteBatch is XNA or exporting / drawing things wrong in GraphicsGale.

Any pointers or guesses about what's going wrong are greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Bear

 

Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a whirl

....

Brilliant, that worked a treat. Debesciak, you're my new best friend :-D
 

Spritebatch has to be started with SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend, i.e.

sb.Begin(SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend);

Also, I've been making dds's the tedious way: I keep an alpha layer and image layer in Paint Shop Pro 7 (my weapon of choice), export the image as imagename.bmp and export the alpha as imagename_a.bmp.  Then, when you drag imagename.bmp into the DX Texture Tool, it automatically couples it with imagename_a.bmp as the alpha channel.  Then I save it.  Tedious!  But I wouldn't have it any other way.

Yeah, why just not try to use that...
http://http.download.nvidia.com/developer/NVTextureSuite/Paint_Shop_Pro_Steps.pdf 

PSP7 will do alpha channels on it's own and save to PNG - but it warns you that the PNG doesn't have an alpha channel. However when you load it into Visual Express it does have the alpha channel. This confused me but it seems to work :)

Instructions for creating image from a texture with a uniform colour background 

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Use the magic wand to select the uniform colour area (ie the background).

Invert the selection

Then do CTRL-C CTRL-V to copy the image so that it doesn't have a pixel background.

Click on Masks -> New -> From Image

Select Source Opacity and Click on OK

Click on Masks -> Save to Alpha Channel

Click on OK and then OK.

Voila - your image now has an alpha channel - save as PNG, ignore warning and it should work.

 
That works for me anyway. 

 In the layer palette you can view the alpha channel by clicking on the little face mask icon next to the glasses icon