The Mikado's New Clothes

[CanadianSteam]

Hello all,

I will be the first to admit I'm a new member here, so pardon me for already asking for assistance without contributing to the community. I've decided to start trying my hand at re-skinning some of Dick's locomotives, namely the 2-8-2 Light Mikado. My attempts to make the engine a glossier black were quite successful but when I attempted to mess with one of the tender road names (re-doing the Grand Trunk Western road name to place an accurate crest where the text was) I ran into some issues.

After editing the texture in Photoshop Elements 5.0 I tested the locomotive in game only to find a rather obscure looking black rectangle around my new GTW crest. Now this had occurred because when I repainted the texture I had painted the background around the crest black. Realizing the error in my ways I went back and removed the background altogether, this resulted in turning it bright white. Trying again for the third time I tried my best to preserve the original background whilst making the edits, unfortunately to no avail. I believe its an issue with the alpha in some way, because when using one of Dick's road names the area underneath the mapped texture shows up as the side of the tender which is what I'm shooting for. Somehow editing the file in Photoshop is interfering with that.

If anyone could provide some insight, that would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
George.

[arizonachris]

Hello, and welcome! Dick (KC Jones) is probably one of the most friendly and helpful guys here, send him an e mail or private message (if he doesn't reply here).

[CanadianSteam]

I'd just like to advise everyone that after a few hours tinkering plus the procurement of a different edition of Photoshop, I was able to succeed in creating proper alpha channels (the source of the issue). I'm well on my way to achieving my goal of producing repaints/road names to contribute to the community here.

Thanks to Dick for his help and to ArizonaChris for the warm welcome! Cheers to you all and Happy New Year!