Paint Shop Pro and IMG files

[rtrowbridge]

Telegraphics has a great plugin that allows Photoshop to read and write IMG files. Unfortunately, my budget doesn't allow me to purchase Photoshop for personal use, so I use Paint Shop Pro X2(PSP) on my Windows Vista laptop.

It appears PSP has a GEM IMG file format hard coded which interferes with the Telegraphics plugin, and I haven't been able to import IMG files from EIAS. If I selected EIformat as the file type, I could get a preview image and dimensions, but would get an error when I tried to open the file.

With a lot of help from Toby T. at Telegraphics, I did some experimenting and found a workaround. The plugin reads and writes IMG, EIM, and EIZ files. If I want to open an IMG file, I change the extension to EIM or EIZ. The file will then open in PSP without any problems for editing. I then save the image and change the extension back to IMG. The saved file works great in EIAS.

I tried using an image with the EIM extension and it did open in EIAS, but had problems with mapping. Only flat mapping worked. Any other mapping type caused problems with the map being badly distorted.

As a test, I took a model of a Centauri Vorchon (Babylon 5) and opened all the JPG files in PSP. I saved each file as an EIM, and then changed the extensions to IMG. I moved the original JPGs to a different directory and opened the project in Animator. I pointed Animator to the the IMG files when it couldn't find the JPGs. Once the project finished opening, all the IMG maps were mapped properly with their UV coordinates.

I would recommend using the EIZ rather than the EIM extension as Modeler uses the EIM extension and could lead to confusion.

The attached file is a snapshot of the Vorchon saved as an IMG, opened in PSP and saved as a JPG.

[Mark Johnston]

Hi nice Render and work around

Mark