Trying to skin a Paladin...

I'm skinning a new Paladin for my campaign "The Silver Hand". A very basic design which almost merges the black haired Paladin (HeroPaladinBoss) with Uther's more detailed Paladin model. Right now I am having two problems.

1) If I paste anything into the skin from another source, it becomes entirely alphaed out during gameplay, with only glow and team color remaining.

2) When comparing the portraits of my new Paladin skin (with an unmodified head at this point) and Uther, Uther is much crisper, as though my skin is being compressed, although I don't think I'm doing that anywhere.

Here's the process I use.
- Extract skin using WinMPQ into BLP format
- Convert skin using BLP convertor packaged with WC3 Viewer
- Edit TGA in Photoshop CS, preserving Alpha Channels
- Reconvert back to BLP and import

Like I said, the skin works fine in-game except when I paste objects in, the only issue there is the quality. Any help is much appreciated. ^_^

merge the alpha channels, goto layers>merge visible.

Thanks alot, worked like a charm. Now my only issue is with the obvious loss of quality, I know for a fact Photoshop isn't compressing them, does the BLP convertor compress skins?

are you using wc3viewer when you convert skins there is a compression value I think 85 is default which is kinda large and will have little compression.

Warcraft 3 image extractor uses 75 btw.

I've been using Image Extractor and extracting straight to TGA's, avoiding the dreaded JPG compression. Or does it compress TGA's as well?

image extrator sux compared to wc3viewer go get it!

I already have it. I've tried converting these skins using WinMPQ, Viewer and Extractor, and they're still getting compressed. Is the BLP converter doing it?

Wc3ie is quick and simple, and I don't know how to get my custom skins to show up in that. If you can tell me how that works I may actually use wc3viewer.