This is another Doodle in which I was practicing another way to do foliage and also to import it onto a backgroud layer, like clouds, sea or land.
To tell you the truth, the background was black, and I said to my self here I go. Then I remembered that EZ had pointed out that if you had a black background and you push transparent, you could get to do a lot of things, this is how this image was done.
There are situations where the black background is definitely required. 
Ah Joe, you’ve discovered the magic of ‘Matte’ work… 
A whole world opens to you now, since that is how they did all those great effects in the movies we watched when we were younger!
Nice image, and a clean matte!
(But if you zoom in and ‘notch’ the edges with black, you can blend even more…)
Gah! I had to get up from bed as I’ve got really bad wind, so I thought what the hell I’ll check the forum to take my mind off it. I’m glad I did - great image DeeVee. Useful tip too.
cool
i remember that Post
just to clear it up i thought i used your JPG off the forum to use transpaernt but that will still mess up a bit.
what i did was ran your tree branch script and used the MRGBZGrabber on it.
then that make it a texture so i turned on transpaernt from there and use the square alpha brush with stroke rect with the simple brush.
i think if anyone wants to use your texture as transparent then you need the orginal .PSD or ZBR or zscript for it to work correctly
Thanks EZ for clearing that up.
The script is available in another thread, so that should not be a problem.
ah, these are wonderful!!! i part. love the bushes at the bottom. what i did when doodling on from your wonderful script was simply creating a plane on another layer and carefully adjusting its z-settings by dragging outside of the gyro to paint on it - later adjustments are possible via the layer-modifiers-z-depth or the tilde-feature 
- juandel
Hey DeeVee!
You’re images are always so wonderful to look at! This one is terrific as usual! 
Another miniature gem from the DeeVee stable! You really have a way with foliage; I especially like the shrubs in the foreground.
your trees are very convincingly realistic…as are your stone works…I always get a black matting around the edges of my leaves and bark and don’t know why? You have overcome my inabilities truly. I can almost see a small spider monkey or two playing about the canopy of your wonderful looking trees…You are a hard act to try to follow Joe…
ron you said " black matting around the edges of my leaves and bark and don’t know why?
are you getting this when using the MRGBZgrabber? when you look in the texture Pallete?
try drawing with your (Depth) very low.
Draw Pallete / Depth
yeppers
Hi Ron sorry about the problem. I sent you an email on the subject. One thing I forgot to mention is that your cursor must be right on the stem or it will pick up the base color.
“Forest Trees”
This is a quick doodle to try and replicate your problem Ron. I was unable to. I will keep trying, that is if you have not got it fixed before I do. 
I’ve just been trying this out for the first time and encountered the same problem that Ron described but DeeVee apparently failed to re-create. I believe I have now solved the mystery. I suspect DeeVee and Ron probably sorted it out in private correspindence, but thought it might be worth publishing here for the benefit of others.
The original version of the tree when painted as a transparent texture onto a 3D Plane had gross thick black outlines to the main trunk and to many of the interstices between the branches. You’ll have to take my word for that: I was going to post a before and after version, but stupidly managed to overwrite the “before” image with the “after” one. The following image is a quick mock-up of roughly what it originally looked like as a transparent texture.
I pondered this for a while, then decided it must be that I had used an alpha with a soft edge when creating the trunk and branches. This had then resulted in a “halo” that appeared black to the naked eye against the black ground, but was in fact not pure black and therefore did not render as transparent in the final stage. I confirmed this using the colour picker, dragging it over the unpleasant “black” outline to read off the values. R, G and B setting were all non-zero - mostly in the mid-teens.
I managed to more or less fix this in the version you see below by exporting the texture to Paint Shop Pro and using the magic want with suitable tolerance (36 in my case) to select all the so-called black areas. This selection was then filled with pure black using the floodfill tool and exported back to ZBrush. The result of creating a 3D Plane with this modified texture can be seen below.
If you look carefully, you will see a few small areas of “pseudo-black” left among the branches where I missed a few bits.
So, the way to avoid it is to ensure that you use a sharp edged alpha, and preferably create it at a size greater than required then reduce it in PSP or PhotoShop. But if you forget, the above method should correct it fairly well in most cases.
great technique Fly catcher…I use that as well…didnt know what caused the problem but you just answered that…another fix I have used also is to use the eraser tool in psp7 also…I make a new white default image and paste the “tree” image onto it and with the tree layer selected use the eraser tool to fine tune the imperfections of the pasted image then switch back to the white layer and fill it with black and merge/flatten the two layers and then use it in z as you described…both of these programs compliment each other definitely …but I like your preventative medicine approach to start out with the right alpha at the beginning of the creation…saves a little bit of headache…thnx FC
Great leaves, Dee.
Thamks FC.When I encountered the problem first, I just decided to make sure that the base was black. I have not had that problem since.
Thanks for sharing.
DeeVee,
Joe.
Yes, I also had a black base colour, DeeVee. But the problem arose because of using a soft-edged alpha when producing the trunk and branches. This spreads a thin “wash” of the brown trunk colour over the black background around the trunk, which is so thin as not to appear to change the base colour to hte naked eye and therefore be invisible. Invisible that is until you use it as a transparent texture, at which point you see the unpleasant not-quite-black halo, which of course not having RGB=0 now shows up.