It is a good idea to keep certain textures in mind while working on a project, but don’t finalize them until you’ve seen the design as a whole. Knowing when to use a texture and which texture to use all boils down to the flow of the design and the priority of information on the page. Of course, not every design benefits from even the most subtle of textures, but you might be surprised at how a high-resolution texture can bring a design to life. I hope you found this information useful, now go make SL beautiful.The number of options, directions, and aesthetic approaches you can take from simply adding a texture to your design is mind-boggling. Bigger than that and it will take forever to load. 512x512 is usually the largest size you'd want for a texture. If you want your texture to look good in SL, choose your texture height and width by powers of 2: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, & 512. No need to have a script running to set something that is already set. Floating text, particle systems, and animated textures are properties of a prim and persist after the script that sets them is deleted. If you use a script to apply a texture or texture animation to a prim, delete it after the texture or texture animation is set.
If you are trying to create a flat object, I highly recomend applying a full alpha texture to the object first, then dragging your alpha textures to the face you want to apply it to.
Don't forget, there are always the lasso and magic and selection tools to play with. You can invert a selection with Shift+Ctrl+I or you can invert pixels with Ctrl + I. If you have a layer with transparencies you can right click on that layer's icon and choose "select layer transparency." Put a dark background layer under that layer and use the layer transparency as your alpha layer to get rid of the "white fuzzies" you might have otherwise. Select-Color Range is an excellent tool if your image is against a solid color backdrop. There are many ways to create selections in Photoshop. Shades of grey will become semi-transparent and will only be slightly tinted red. It's kinda confusing but: Black: Masked Tinted Red In Quick Mask Mode Not Selected in Normal Mode Black in Alpha Channel When Created from Selection Tranparent in SL White: UnMasked Not Tinted Quick Mask Mode Selected in Normal Mode White in Alpha Channel When Created from Selection Not Tranparent in SL For this step just remember that white is opaque and black is transparent and transparency shows up as a red tint on your image. Using the paintbrush tool or your tool of choice, paint the parts of the image you want to be non-tranparent white. All tinted pixels are not selected and will become transparent when we make our alpha channel. Use the paint bucket tool to fill the mask with black. Essentially starting off everything is selected so the mask is "white" and clear. A white square with a white circle in it is normal mode and a grey square with a white circle is quick mask mode. The current mode is displayed on the Tools menu near the bottom. Press Q to toggle between normal and quick mask modes.
This tutorial will detail how to create a selection using quick mask, and how to save it as an alpha channel. In fact the quick mask feature lets you "paint" a selection and toggle it back and forth from a temporary alpha channel to an active selection. A selection could be considered a temporary channel. One of the great features of Photoshop is it's ability to juggle selections to channels back and forth. White is fully opaque and black is fully transparent. An alpha channel is another greyscale image that says how opaque that pixel is. This is useful if we want to add more information to a pixel. To complicate matters further, we can add more channels. So each channel is a monochrome version of the image varying on how much of that color is in the image. In red-green-blue channels values can range from 0 to 100%. Each of these colors can be considered a "channel" or a sub-version of the image. Pixel colors are usually stored in terms of the amount of red, green, and blue. If you've ever played with a crystal prism, you know that most light can be broken down into different colors.
Each pixel has its own set of values for how to display it, which is usually its color. Confused as to what an alpha channel is? Let me tell you a little bit about channels, masks, and transparency. There are three basic steps: Selecting your pixels, making an alpha channel from those pixels, and saving the image as a targa file with alpha channels. Making textures with alpha channels is pretty easy once you get the hang of it.