Choose a frame and a specific edit
Set Output frame index to the animation frame you want to retain. Keep existing alpha preserves its stored alpha bytes. Make every pixel opaque replaces alpha with 255, while Invert alpha maps each value a to 255 minus a. Threshold uses your chosen integer boundary: with threshold 128, an input alpha of 127 becomes zero and 128 becomes 255.
Horizontal and vertical flips move whole RGBA pixels. RGB channels remain unchanged by an alpha-only operation, including color hidden under full transparency. The operations are applied separately to every existing mip in the selected frame. They do not create additional mip levels or recalculate smaller images from the edited largest level.
Review what the new file carries
The VTF download is a new desktop VTF 7.2 containing one frame in uncompressed RGBA8888 format. Its mip sizes and existing mip count follow the selected source frame. Smaller levels are stored before larger levels as the file format requires. Because compressed input is expanded to four bytes per pixel, the output can be larger than the original DXT file.
Other animation frames, the thumbnail, custom resource chunks and special-purpose flags are not copied. Basic sampling, clamping and sRGB flags are retained; alpha flags and the single-mip flag are calculated from the output. Starting frame is reset to zero, bump scale to one and reflectivity is recalculated from the top-level color pixels. The report records source and output flags so this change is visible.
Test a separate material copy
Download the unchanged original as well as the edited result. Open the new texture in your target Source 1 tool and compare the retained mip levels. If you replace a material texture, keep a backup and verify its name, directory and shader settings in a separate test copy before distributing it.
An axis flip is a pixel rearrangement, not a tangent-space normal-map correction. This tool does not invert or renormalize normal-vector components, simulate lighting or rebuild shader-specific metadata. It also does not guarantee that a game branch accepts every size or flag combination. Use the new file when the explicit one-frame RGBA workflow fits your material, and retain the original container for workflows requiring its animation or special resources.