I use a great many Photoshop CC PSD files with transparency masks. I need to see instantly if the the images I am viewing have transparent backgrounds. To this end I ended up installing Magic Thumbs which has the ability to generate thumbnails with transparent backgrounds.
The new thumbnails work a dream with PDF files. With PSD files, however, there are problems.
I can drag images from Opus folders onto the desktop and see that the images have transparent backgrounds. However, in Opus folders this does not work. The background of the PSD masked images is always white. In Explorer the backgrounds are transparent.
Am I missing at Opus setting along the way somewhere? Any ideas would be appreciated.
Opus extracts the embedded thumbnails Photoshop saves into PSD files itself. It won't be calling the add-on for them, unless an Opus-specific plugin overrides the internal behavior.
Many thanks, Leo. I take it from your reply there is nothing that can be done apart from writing an Opus plugin to stop the present behavior with PSD files
I just remembered, we added a setting which lets you disable internal image viewers: Preferences / Miscellaneous / Advanced: viewer_disable_internal (Opus 12 & above only)
Adding .psd to that setting should mean Opus looks externally for the thumbnails. But it would also mean the same for viewing PSD files, so you would need to ensure the 3rd party component (or a second component) provides a viewer as well as thumbnails.
(The thumbnails themselves can be used by the viewer, and sometimes thumbnail components generate full-sized thumbnails which also work great in the viewer, but sometimes they only generate small ones.)
The tiff_assume_alpha setting only affects tiff files, not PSD.
Opus can display transparency, but not with PSD files, since it uses the thumbnails Photoshop itself embeds into the files and they do not have transparency information (or at least did not the last time I looked).
We could probably extend the setting to affect thumbnails as well as the viewer (unrelated to the message about not affecting plugins; Opus plugins are not involved here), although it will have to wait until 12.2 at this stage as we are finalising things for the first 12.1 non-beta release.
For me it works also for psd files if this setting is on: Preferences / Miscellaneous / Advanced: psd_image_preference Preview image for both thumbnail and viewer
Thanks for your efforts and suggestions OpelOpus. On my system 16 bit PSD files with masks appear with a solid black backgrounds as opposed to white on 8 bit PSDs. I suppose that allows you to tell 16 bit files from 8 bit files very easily, but does not solve the transparency problem.
I think the point I am trying to make is that DOpus - by a country mile the best Windows file manger I have ever used - should allow users to "see" transparency. Using Mystic Thumbs I can "see" the transparency in Explorer but not in Opus. If I am to pay a premium for a file manager, I would expect it to at least match the abilities of the file manager it is replacing in such a basic area.
That we are still taking about this in 2016, shows how deeply Windows has failed to address the needs of the graphics industry, and allowed Macs to dominate that territory. Not that I will be buying a Mac any time soon. After all, I could not use Opus.
Sorry, this is turning into a rant, and that is the last thing I want it to be. Let's hope that Jon et al can come up with a solution some time soon.
The file manager you are comparing to (Explorer) does not display PSD thumbnails at all on its own. Opus has it built in.
(The built-in PSD code displays the flattened image preview and thumbnail data that Photoshop itself embeds in the files. Unless something has changed, that data has no transparency information.)
The problem is you want to use a 3rd party add-on instead of the built-in PSD code, which is only possible for the viewer currently, as built-in code normally overrides add-on code.
It's possible 16bit PSDs have embedded TIFF thumbnails with (unmarked) alpha, which Opus then decodes if it's set to assume unmarked alpha is transparency data.
If I remember correctly, 8bit PSD files use JPEG for their thumbnails, and JPEG does not support transparency. The transparency data obviously exists elsewhere in the PSD file, along with all the other layers and effects data, but is not built into the embedded thumbnail data (unless there's some augment to it which I am not aware of).
Checking my own 16bpp PSD saved with the latest version of Photoshop, transparency works as long as Opus is set to use the embedded preview image, not the embedded thumbnail, for thumbnails.
The tiff_assume_alpha option does not seem to be needed here. (Maybe it is with files saved in older versions of Photoshop.)
[ul][li]Opus has built-in PSD thumbnail and viewer support.[/li]
[li]It works by showing whatever image data Photoshop embedded into the file.[/li]
[li]Photoshop can embed both a full-size preview and a smaller thumbnail (or neither, depending on its configuration). Opus lets you choose which to use.[/li]
[li]Opus supports transparency, but Photoshop only seems to save transparency data into 16bpp preview images, not thumbnails and not 8bpp (AFAIK).[/li]
[li]Some 3rd party cools can extract the transparency data from 8bpp PSD files via some method (which could be parsing the actual layers etc.).[/li]
[li]Opus won't currently let you call 3rd party code for thumbnails if it has built-in code for the file format (unless the code is packaged as an Opus-specific plugin).[/li]
[li]We can change that in 12.2.[/li][/ul]
Many thanks, Leo for succinct explanation, which fits exactly with what I have discovered through much experimenting. Why on earth Adobe should choose to use JPEG previews on 8bit PSD files is beyond me when one of the main reasons for using the format is to create transparency masks.
Your plans to make changes to DOpus in 12.2 will be very welcome to those who make extensive use of PSD files.
I had a look at the code to understand why there was alpha there for 16bpp and not for 8bpp, and it turns out the PSD files do have alpha for 8bpp as well, we just weren't always using it. So transparency should work with both 8bpp and 16bpp without needing any third party add-ons, or the extra option (similar to viewer_disable_internal) I was talking about before.
It will still require setting PSD thumbnails to use the embedded preview image instead of the embedded thumbnail image (since the latter does't include alpha data), but we may make that the default anyway as the thumbnails aren't large enough for high DPI on top of having no alpha.
(Also, the tiff_assume_alpha setting should not affect things at all when it comes to PSD files.)
You guys are amazing and a credit to the software industry. I spent twenty odd years dealing with software companies around the world in my work in the graphics and print industry, but I have never witnessed service like this. To bring up a problem and have a solution within a couple of days - and at a weekend - is above and beyond. Thank you for your efforts.
I hope this does not scupper the 12.2 plans to allow external programs to produce thumbs for DOpus, as they do bring other goodies to the party
