I'm not fully understanding this. Let me see if I got this right.

Oh boy were do I start.

I will start with photoshop I make the leaves with a black background & the leaves white? Or do you mean do this in hypershade?

And you mean alpha out in the connection editor? And then over in inputs I have translucence, translucence focus & translucence depth, but no map?

And again the black & white thing I don't get it? Do you mean once again in the connection editor? In the outputs I have color gain, color offset, default color & out color. Is that what you mean by default, as in default color? And over in the inputs I have color > color R, color G & color B. And then ambient color > ambient color R, ambient color G & ambient B.

And do you mean save it as a tiff or tag in maya or photoshop?

What i'm doing is saving texture from photoshop as jpg, oh and I tryed to save as tiff and when I open it in hypershade its black, is that what you mean by black? Anyway then I MMB over the lambert and get this list:

Connect input of: lambert2

Default, if this is what you mean by default then how do I open up the connection editor for alpha & the black & white color part?

Ambient color

Incandescence

Transparency

Bump map

Displacement map

Other...

If you could explain in a little more detail I would really appereciate it very much.

Sorry for my ignorance