I have been following the lesson that John Hockings put out and all is going well until i get to creating the blend mask. on page 13 of the tutorial he says when creating a blend mask "Again, Show/Hide all other layers" and shows a picture of a black outer area with a white area where the photoscenery is. I can get the black outer area fine but i still see the photoscenery, and not a white area covering it. I am using photoshop 7.0 to do the blend and the water mask- and i have the same issue with the water mask. In johns picture you only see the layer with the water, i cant seem to separate when doing water. when i use FSX i can see my photoscenery fine but the blending is non existent of course so you see a big square or rectangle of photoscenery on the FSX textures. I know it probably is a simple step i am missing but it is keeping the new texture from blending in and looking nice.Thanks, kyleP.S. for those who do not have it, here is the link to the tutorial- http://aussiex.org/forum/index.php?/topic/74-ozx-guides-10-making-scenery-for-country-airstrips/

I can get the black outer area fine but i still see the photoscenery, and not a white area covering it.

I just took a real quick glance at the Professor's tutorial, so I can't really respond to it. Where you have your black surrounding area aka what get's left out of the compile process, have you then taken the area that contains what you do want to be kept and painted that as pure white, 0,0,0? Pure white stays in, pure black gets left out. Some gradient of gray between the back and white serves to feather any hard edges.I'm supposing there is a new layer above the source imagery (BMP file), so once the blendmask is done, delete the layer with the source imagery, then convert the layer that is the blendmask to 8-bit grayscale and save as a TIFF file, with NO compression (LZW, etc.). Photoshop can create some extra info in the TIFF file header which can generate a Resample warning message, but that does not stop the file from compiling OK.

I use GIMP, but from reading the tutorial, it sounds like what he is doing is first open the summer photo texture as a base layer, then create a new layer that is initialized to white. Then he does his lasso selection on the base layer (might need to turn off visibility or set a transparency of the top layer while doing this to see the base), then works on the top layer by inverting the selection and painting that black. So at first the top layer is all white, then the "outside" is made black, with some dithering at the boundary. With the top layer 100% opaque (or 0% transparent, same thing) you should be able to flatten the image and convert to 8 bit grayscale and export as tiff.scott s..

i think the problem i am having is making the layer and then deleting the first layer but i can see how this may be the issue i am having. a little more practice should get me there.thanks for the advice, Kyle