Scarlet Weather Rhapsody CV2 PNG doesn't have transparency?

[marconi]

I've been trying to extract spell effect sprites from Scarlet Weather Rhapsody for the past few hours with limited success. I used Brightmoon to extract the relevant cv2 and pal files, and then used the cv2conv utility to convert them to png's, but they don't seem to retain their transparency, instead when I open it in Photoshop CS6, they've got a solid black background.

In another post on this site, Drake mentioned that the images might be 8-bit PNG with an alpha channel.

Here:
"The "problem" is that the images are 8-bit PNG with alpha channel. How the image format works is that there's a color map with 256 colors used in the image, and the index of each of these colors is what is stored per pixel. This way instead of using all 24 bits to store the RGB color per pixel, it only needs to use 8. In addition, each indexed color can carry an alpha value, so if all of the color and alpha combos fit in the 256 colors then it's a good space-saver. "

And recommended that the png file be fed through pngout /c6 /force <filename.png>. I downloaded the utility from http://advsys.net/ken/utils.htm and fed the previous png's through resulting in a png about 80% of the size of the original. However, it still had the black background when I opened it in Photoshop CS6.

At this point, I'm stumped. How can I get the original sprites as transparent pngs?

Thanks!!
-- cacotigon

[Dark Kitsune]

Edit: Never mind, I seem to have read your post wrong.

[Blargel]

I glanced through this page while looking for an answer:
http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/5888/why-cant-photoshop-properly-open-this-png

It had a few interesting things to say, but I don't know if there's any sort of solution that you can use. Here's a few highlights that might help:

Yep, that's an indexed-color PNG all right. I just tried opening it in GIMP, and the text looks really blocky because it's using 1-bit transparency in indexed color mode. However, simply changing the color mode to RGB fixes it; you could try and see if the same trick might work in Photoshop too

changing to RGB in PSD did not reveal the image as it is supposed to look...

It is indeed a PNG 8, with a truly odd palette. Here's how it opens in Fireworks, which both identifies and renders it correctly.

you can open the indexed png in Preview.app or pixlr.com and resave the image as a png to get lossless access to the image. You can then resave the image in whatever format with PS.

[Drake]

The images I was talking about were in particular images extracted from DDC. I don't know what you're getting out of the CV2 files, really, but I couldn't say that pngout would do the job if the image's alpha values were just ignored or squashed when you ripped and converted it. The unknown is how the conversion utility works, I think.

Blargel: Those sorts of posts are what informed the post of mine he's referencing lol