No I used photoshop elements. I would have prefered to use gimp, but DICE seems to have used some odd method for doing the dds textures.
What the alpha is in these dds files is a selection showing the game what to display, so when you copy and paste the alpha selection, you get exactly what gimp shows. The checkerd board is actuall in the backgound, all of it is where that greenish bg color you would normally see is (and some other small details). GIMP also seemed to save the dds files in the wrong format for bf2 as well. Though I havent tested it much as it is hard work with an image that you only see a small fraction of (the icon atals is not too bad, enough is missing though. But take the faav texture for example, almost nothing shows up).
Anyway here is the dds plugin for wingimp 2.2+
http://www.serversidemodding.com/users/ ... 32-0.4.zip