Thursday, 29 December 2011

Alpha Channel

Alpha channel......
Few days ago, I wanted to put an image while generating PDF by using FPDF, I got an error that said 'Alpha channel is not supported'. I got stunned and started to think what is it?

In Computer Graphics , Alpha channel is used as an opacity channel. Alpha channel will ensure that how much your image will be transparent or not and it is an additional channel that can be added to an image which contains transparency information about the image. Depending on the type of alpha it can contain various levels of transparency. In PNG/TIFF alpha channel represents up to 256 levels of transparency.

A 32 bit graphics system contains four channels where three 8 bit channel are for Red,Green,Blue (RGB) and one8 bit alpha channel. So alpha channel is simply use of RGB model with extra information. Alpha channel values can be expressed as a percentage, integer, or real number between 0 and 1 like RGB parameters.If a pixel has a value of 0% in its alpha channel, it is fully transparent (and, thus, invisible), whereas a value of 100% in the alpha channel gives a fully opaque pixel .
The following are the file type that support alpha channel:
    * TIFF     * TGA     * PNG     * PSD (Photoshop)     * GIF (special alpha)

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