In photoshop 7 when I load a PNG or TGA with an alpha channel it doesn''t view it separately but adds it as transparency to the image. How do I view it separatly?

look under the channels tab in the same window as your layers, should be a channel for each red blue green and alpha

Assuming you don''t see any other channels besides the seperate RGB ones, you can ctrl-click on the layer (should only be one), and you''ll load the transparency mask as a selection. Then you can go into your channels palette and click the "save selection as channel" button (looks like a circle inside a square), and you''ll be able to view the "alpha" channel as a grayscale image.

Ok that worked but the alpha data is still applied to the image (I can see the checkerboard pattern). Saving the file doesn''t help at all, it makes it permanently transparent

How do I treat alpha as a spearate channel and NOT transparency?