Alpha Channels

[MortenBalling]

Hi all

I'm currently working with combining large amounts of astro images (jpg) into one image. You can read more about it here:

http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=7506.0

Using starAlign I enable Generate Masks, and get a separate fit file (xxxxx_m.fit) with the mask for each image, but is there a way to embed the masks into the xxxxx_r.fit files?

Is the a way to add alpha channels using a script? I've tried CreateAplhaChannels, which does the job, but with several hundreds of files, it's pretty time consuming.

Finally: Is there an easy way to remove alpha channels? Right now, I split the image into R, G and B and then combine those with LRGBCombination.

I've been thinking about using another software to convert the jpg files into tif or png and add an alpha channel using other software, as alpha channels works fine in PI once they are embedded, but I'd like to try to make all processing  in PI.

Thanks in advance

Morten

Edit: ExtractAlphaChannels has an option that deletes the alpha channel. Sorry.