Hi,
I've never used Photoshop before and had an interesting weekend of trial and error. I'm trying to understand the green, blue and alpha1 channels control over the RGB channel with 32bit RGB BMP.
1. - The Alpha1 channel controls the alpha level like the alpha slider in the gunsight selection app in the hanger. The gray scale image in the alpha 1 channel controls this in a gradient from black to white on a black background. What happens if I widen that image wider than the RGB channel's drawing? Will the RGB background color begin to be revealed with the drawing because I'm not masking that out with black from the alpha 1 channel? For now I'm testing a Gaussian blurred 12 pixel wide yellow ring 200 pixels in diameter.
2. - How do the gray scale channel gradient images in the green and blue channels effect the RGB channel? And what happens if I make those larger than the defined edges of the RGB drawing? And if I don't widen the alpha 1 channel gray scale drawing equal to the G, B channel gray scale drawings.
3. - In Photoshop is there a tool which will cause the red, green, blue, and apha 1 images to auto align on a common point with the image in the RGB channel before saving the work? It seems Photoshop does not always accurately render the positions of the gray scale images to the same point in the G,B, and alpha 1 channels. Nor does it auto align back to the same position if I copy the image from the RGB channel and paste it to the Blue or Alpha 1 channel. I discovered this by accident using the magic picker tool on the RGB channel image, then flipping through the other images seeing that the selection lines showed the G, B, and Alpha 1 images were off usually down to the right.
4. - Initially I created the image in 24bit RGB BMP in another art program, then opened it in Photoshop to pick the image and paste it into a new Photoshop project. Then save that as a 32bit RGB BMP. Upon reopening it the new alpha 1 channel is all black and sometimes the blue channel. At which point I would copy the RGB image into them to create the gray scale image. Is this a normal function of creating a 32bit image in Photoshop?
It seems on the Internet finding a layman's explanation of how these channels work together is harder than the two days of simply pushing buttons I did to get the finished trial by error product. Even Adobe does a lousy job of explaining their product.
