This is a request for Shades and Tilecutter developers (VS and Timothy) I've noticed that some newbies that use any of them, usually fail when loading images with transparency (alpha channel activated) and they don't realize where's the problem... People with some graphics development experience may figure out where the problem is but I think would be useful that when you load an image with transparency that won't be possible to be processed, both programs may open a pop-up window with a message pointing out that situation.
Something like "this image has alpha channel activated and It's not possible to load it. Please remove transparency from the image"
Better to build in an option to strip this information automatically. TileCutter should already export as a 24bit PNG, ignoring the alpha channel during composition. I'll have to check this. I'll make it check if the image has an alpha channel, and if so whether that channel contains any data. If it does, I can prompt the user to flatten the image to 24bit (with maybe a selectable colour). If not the alpha channel can be safely discarded.
I'll put it on the roadmap for 0.6.
Good idea. Shades already discard alpha as a side-product of how the data is treated. Or that's what I think...