Participant

Question

File transparency on Export (not background)

Forum|Forum|1 month ago
March 2, 2026
2 replies
60 views

Hi, I’m trying to export a rendering that has transparency showing through a portion of the layers themselves. For clarity, I have no problem exporting to png or tiff without a background, but there’s a portion of the image itself that is translucent. In photoshop, it retains the translucency when i put images underneath it, but if i try to export it and use it on top of something else (I’m a testing this on a layer in InDesign) it no longer has the translucency to the underlying background.

Any ideas? FYI, there are no groups to the layers, the portion I want to remain translucent is set to screen without anything behind it, and I’ve tried saving to web, saving a copy, saving as…. png and tif

E

ExUSA

Legend

Can you just use the PSD file directly in your layout?

EColehausAuthor

Participant

Unfortunately, I have to send this to a client for presentation use and they need png files (not even tiff’s)

E

ExUSA

Legend

So are they using InDesign, Powerpoint, or ??? At some point they have to create a layout and that would be where to adjust the transparency.

davescm

Community Expert

Screen is a blend mode. A blend mode describes how a layer will interact with the layer(s) below it. It only applies within the image file. As such if you export your image the layer blend mode does not apply outside of the image.

Instead to create transparency use a mask which will be semi-transparent where the mask is grey, and will remain semi-transparent when exported to PNG or TIFF.

Note: You can use blending modes on objects InDesign (from the Effects panel) but that will apply to the entire image not just selected parts as you describe with one layer set to screen in Photoshop.

Dave

EColehausAuthor

Participant

Thanks for your reply. I tried using an alpha channel as a mask. This also didn’t export to png with actual transparency. And for the record, when set to Normal, instead of Screen mode, the layer has embedded alpha transparency from the rendering output tiff file that works in photoshop but not exported as a png. Any other ideas?

davescm

Community Expert

I’ve just exported a png with transparency checked using Export and placed it in InDesign where the transparency was used.

Photoshop :

Photoshop Export:

InDesign:

Dave

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