- Four separate failures, all of them "the background came through into the file":
- The generator shaded its magenta backdrop toward the corners, so the corner test failed and the whole background survived. The key now accepts shaded magenta.
- Edge pixels were being despilled — guessed at. They're now un-blended: a pixel near the background is treated as art over key, and its true colour and a real fractional alpha are recovered. Thin lines with nothing solid nearby are left exactly as they were.
- A JPEG smeared the key into the first and last rows of a strip, leaving a purple line.
- One image came back on solid black instead of a transparent or magenta background, and the black bands were fitted into the texture as if they were part of it. A band at least eight rows thick and dark right across is now trimmed, so a sprite's own near-black outline lives.
- Asking for the right thing turned out to matter more than removing it afterwards: the prompts now ask for transparency first and name magenta only as a fallback. That one wording change is most of why magenta stopped arriving at all.
- The un-blending was ported from the Art Director's app rather than invented here, so both apps now cut out identically — which is the studio's own signal that the code belongs in a shared library. It's queued as
lib/imaging/, owned by the Art Director.
Sprite Manager September 19, 2026 Iteration 51