Transparency

[petzi-mg]

Since this is my first post: hi folks!

I worked with Paintshop Pro since a long time (Jasc Paintshop Pro 4, I believe to remember...), but something that always disturbed me is
a) to use transparency, I have to reduce color depth to 256/8-bit
b) I can't save an image with transparency in BMP format, because PSP doesn't support 32bit-BMP files.

Because of this restrictions I started to use GIMP, but GIMP doesn't have a script recorder (and writing a script from scratch is a pain in a.. for a complex task), and it doesn't have a native batch conversion.

I was hoping that both issues are solved during the years, but as I see (in the PSP X9 test version), both hasn't changed yet. I'm really surprised about it.
Is there a way to work on this with some kind of plug-in or something like that?

[LeviFiction]

Just slightly curious, why 32-bit BMP specifically?

I don't know of any plugins for the BMP file format as Photoshop already supports using Alpha Channels to add BMP transparency. GIMP's command line does have a batch mode, you just need to know the commands. There is also a batch processing plugin for the GIMP if you wanted to try that.

If you wanted to use PSP over GIMP you can use an advanced script and external software to at least simulate saving as a BMP.

I recommend ImageMagick as a wonderfully fast conversion utility over gimp. But you could use either. The script in PSP would work like this, it would open the SaveAs dialog with PNG as the format. Then it would take the file name you give it and run either imageMagick or GIMP via commandline on it and convert it to a BMP. PSP will not be able to see the transparency of the BMP if you try and load it back in, but that's what the PNG is for.

[petzi-mg]

I want to modify bmp images for a game I frequently play. 32-bit RGBA BMP format is necessary for this.
Thanks for pointing me to ImageMagick, I tested it with commandline it works perfectly!