Transcript

Hello and welcome to lesson 3.4a Opening and Saving Files for VTF Use in Photoshop presented by MLPTF2Mods.com. As the title suggests, this video is designed for Photoshop users. If you use GIMP, you should check out lesson 3.4b which is specifically designed for GIMP instead. With that said, let’s get started.

First thing we need to do is bring up Photoshop and open the TARGA file we exported in the last lesson. Once open, you are pretty well set to start modifying the texture as you please. For this example I am going to just quickly whip up something vaguely Rarity related. It is going to look rather similar to Rarity’s Bodkin v1 on the site. This quick modification is just to give us something to compare against the original once we get it in game. This is not intended to be a lesson for how to make use of Photoshop. By the looks of it, this should work.

Be sure to save your work at one point or another in Photoshop format so you can come back to it in the future or just incase the program crashes while working. Take note that despite how basic the changes are that I made, I never modified the background layer and kept each element on separate layers. While not required, it is good practice for a variety of reasons.

Now, you should remember we looked at the alpha channel in the last lesson. In Photoshop, by going to the channels tab, you can check out that alpha layer and see that it is still there and edit if needed. I always encourage checking to make sure the alpha layer is there when one is supposed to be there. Since it’s not a visible layer, it can go missing and you wouldn’t readily notice it. So check for those alphas.

Now for saving the image to be imported with VTFEdit. As you might have been able to guess, we will be saving it as a TGA. Once again, the reason for choosing TARGA is for the lossless quality and to maintain the separate alpha channel. Regarding the file name, I will keep it as c_shogun_kunai. Though to prevent Photoshop from overwriting the original file we exported, I am going to create a new folder titled finished and save it inside there.

That pretty much wraps up the process of opening and saving files for VTF use in Photoshop. Never forget about those alpha layers and keep using TGA format. We are now ready to move on to the next lesson about importing and saving textures using VTFEdit.