Does Blender support texture with straight alpha My question is simple: does Blender support texture where RGB is color, and A is a grayscale texture (not transparency)?

The image file can be PNG or TGA, both with straight (aka unassociated) alpha, and all I want is to extract that alpha, without affecting the color channels.

So far, I have tried every "color space" + "use alpha" setting combination, and none can give me both a straight alpha and correct RGB color:


I can pick sRGB/Linear without alpha, then I got RGB channel right, but A channel is all white.
I can pick sRGB/Linear/Non-color/Raw with alpha, then I got A channel right, but all black in RGB channel.


And this only affects Render view. Material view is somehow happy either way.

Any clues?
This behaviour seems to be internal, so no easy way to modify it.
But a way to facilitate that duplication process is to instead of duplicating the texture file itself, duplicating the Image datablock that references the file inside Blender.


Create the Image Texture node as usual and duplicate it, and then click the user number to make a new copy of the Image datablock -- they will both reference the same file but have separate Use Alpha settings.