Blender only supports saving premultiplied/associated alpha to OpenEXR files. Any other format gets converted to straight alpha (including formats like TIFF that can actually support premulitplied). You have to either save as OpenEXR or do the workaround.
And the render view won’t show the image correctly on the checkerboard background, btw. It’s a longstanding bug in Blender that the “color and alpha” view doesn’t actually comp the checkerboard in correctly for premultiplied files, even though that’s the only kind Blender actually renders to.
In the image you posted and the blend file you uploaded the only problem is the material. I’ll send you one to try out, if the result is not better I’ll leave the conversation since I clearly don’t understand the real issue.
It’s alright; Thank You very much guys… I actually do have a habit of not meshing well and painting myself into a corner on forums; And you’ve all been very polite and helpful.
I think this post will be very useful to people (I’ve landed here before), hopefully to @Dominik_Jiruse as well.
@Josip_Kladaric, @J_the_Ninja already answered my last bit of confusion. It’s just by chance that one of my only avenues didn’t have a proper output in blender (tif), and he also clarified the state of in-blender display. So, we’re all good. … I just need to find, invest in, or write my own tools; And I’ll use the node trick for now.
I meant to reply to this earlier, but didn’t get around to it until now. I just want to clarify one thing, assuming I am interpreting what you wrote correctly. Alvy Ray Smith, the guy Zap Anderson cites for street cred, invented integral aka “straight” alpha in 1977 along with Ed Catmull. Thomas Porter and Tom Duff invented associated aka “premultiplied” alpha in 1984. The four of them were awarded an Academy Award in 1996 “for pioneering inventions in digital image compositing” aka inventing the 2 forms of alpha.
Does associated alpha have advantages over integral alpha when compositing? Yes. Is associated alpha the only one that can accurately store in an image format light that does not occlude? Yes. However, integral alpha did come first.
What I figured out instead of trying to use the alpha to completely remove the background, was to use an HDR or image as background to match the final usage in post-production.
In my case, I needed transparent particles on an image, so I used as background another image with similar reflections and colors. Then rendered in Cycles with the appropriate settings and translated to Photoshop
