Color Mask Troubles

I'm running into a problem when I import images as sprite animation frames. I use an art program called Pencil (http://www.pencil-animation.org/) for drawing my sprites, which automatically applies an anti-alias effect. When I imported them into Construct I set "pure white" as the transparency, and selected/deleted all dead space around my sprite, but where it's anti-aliased there is a thin, jaggy "almost white" border going 97% of the way around my sprite.

So my question is, is there an easier way to solve this problem other than going back to the original art files and going around the edges pixel by pixel, deleting the "almost white" border? I tried going back into Pencil and filling the space around the sprite with a vivid blue, which DID get rid of the almost white border, but then when I imported back to Construct I couldn't figure out how to set that *exact* shade of blue as the color mask.

I guess I could always go into the Pencil options and turn off anti-alias, but that would require re-drawing all the sprites I've done so far, not to mention, they look a whole lot better with the anti-alias. Any help anyone could offer would be greatly appreciated.

What about alpha channels? did you try to save your files as tga or tif?

never use Pencil before, but you could check if you can export to file that supports alpha instead of bg colour.

Yeah, unless Pencil supports alpha channels, this method really wont work for anti aliasing.

Basically whats happening is that the editor has no way to know if certain pixels are semi transparent.

I had a similar problem using renders from blender. I ended up using a PNG format, rendering using RGBA, and the premultiplier. Not sure if this is useful for your software, but it's the combination that worked for blender.

Yeah, I agree.

I export to PNG from both Photoshop and Max when using Construct.

I'm sure Pencil supports alpha channels, but I've rarely used it so I can't be sure.

I know it supports layers, so if it does support alpha channels, create everything on layers other than the bottom one, and when exporting to PNG, make sure the bottom level is invisible.

It should then import into Construct, along with a perfect alpha channel.

Krush.

Okay, thanks a lot everybody. I'm an utter beginner and, until this thread, honestly had no idea what alpha channels were, but this definitely is the solution I needed.

Glad to see there's a board on the net where people actually help newbies! What a concept!

I have a very similar problem, but not from Pencil tool. My friend told me that my problem come from setting of alpha channel which I really don't understand since i'm a beginner too. Finally I going back to start from original image again. Hope you don't give up like me..