Photoshop Elements Sculptie Guide
This guide is to help sculptie-creators using Photoshop Elements to directly manipulate their sculpt maps. If you're using a different application, try one of the following guides:
Photoshop
Paint Shop Pro
The GIMP
This guide is not meant to teach you how to make awesome textures for your sculpts. If you're looking for something like that, you will have to search elsewhere.
These methods have been tested in Photoshop Elements versions 2 and 4. There shouldn't be much difference in other versions.
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Photoshop Elements does not support editing individual channels.
Mirror your mesh in Blender, export the new sculpt map, then flip the map horizontally in PSE.
Mirroring
Photoshop Elements has no functionality for editing individual channels, so mirroring sculpt maps using only this software is impossible, as far as I know.
To mirror your sculpts, you will need to mirror your mesh in Blender (see this tutorial), export a new sculpt map. Then pull the new sculpt map into PSE and flip it horizontally so your sculpt doesn't import inside-out.
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Promote the background to a layer and then set the layer opacity to 1% or higher. Save as a PNG file.
Alpha Protection
To add alpha protection to your sculpt map in Photoshop Elements, you have to use the PNG file format.
PNG Format
NOTE to long-time png users. In order to make the file size smaller, Photoshop does NOT save RGB values for completely transparent pixels in a PNG image. In order to retain the RGB data, you have to have all the pixels SLIGHTLY visible.
In the Layers menu, make the background layer into a normal layer. This can be done by double-clicking the background and hitting "OK" on the dialog that comes up.
Now change the opacity of the layer to about 1% - NOT 0%. This will still keep your sculpt map from being stolen while forcing Photoshop to save the RGB information to the sculpt map image.
Save as PNG with no interlace and upload to Second Life.
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