# Transparent colour?



## ReeKorl (Mar 25, 2005)

OK, I'm looking for any advice on how to make a picture (specifically, my avatar <--) show up with translucent colours, ie the surrounds don't show up in white, they show up in whatever the backing colour of the page is. 

I can get this to work as a bitmap, but if I convert the image to gif/png/jpg it shows up in magenta instead of see-through. Is there any way to make this work for a gif file, using only mspaint? (can't be bothered to go out and buy design software for what would probably be only one use).


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## Spatcher (Apr 28, 2005)

ReeKorl said:


> (can't be bothered to go out and buy design software for what would probably be only one use).


You can download the GIMP, an open source thing like mspaint. Best of all...It's Free!!

(i got it from the live cd of ubuntu)


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## Spatcher (Apr 28, 2005)

Go to www.gimp.org/downloads


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## ReeKorl (Mar 25, 2005)

Cheers Justin, I'll give that a try.


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## Volt-Schwibe (Jan 12, 2003)

no man, it's easy as cheese.

when in paint, you select the cut tool.

then you select the option that allows you to ignore the background color.

now, pixel 1, (the top left pixel) needs to be magenta.

then, everything magenta will be transparent.


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## DumberDrummer (Oct 27, 2003)

Just don't use png... IE botched that one, and doesn't render transparent pngs properly, and you'll get a lot of people going "huh?" when you tell them that its supposed to be transparent.

Try this one... the only problem is that it isn't anti-aliased against whatever color it's against. The price you have to pay. It just looks a bit sharper, that's all.


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## Volt-Schwibe (Jan 12, 2003)

drummer, that's funny, you did exactly what i was going to do.

i started to in fact, but then the existing anti aliasing was messing with my head, so i gave up.


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## Volt-Schwibe (Jan 12, 2003)

and i beleive that if you want to make a gif that also is transparent, you make all the individual frames in this manner, so that each are correctly "transparentized" and then insert them in the gifmaker tool.

then the entire gif should be able to do the same thing.

and, this trick works for making icons too, i learned it while making icons with transparent parts.


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## ReeKorl (Mar 25, 2005)

Excellent, thanks guys (nice work on that one DD!)


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## DumberDrummer (Oct 27, 2003)

No problem. 

It looks kind of weird without the anti aliasing...it looks so solid. 

:4-dontkno


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