Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations IamaSherpa on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Transparent .gifs 1

Status
Not open for further replies.

danima

Programmer
Jan 9, 2002
134
CA
Hey folks:

I have a strange question...but it's bugged me for a long time. I have a circle with an arrow cut out in it. I need this on several pages...all with different backgrounds and I want to lay this on top. So, I create a .gif that is transparent and unfortunately it ends up with jagged edges or deformed. I change from adaptive to perceptual, from not dither to pattern and noise, from No Transparency dither to one of the other options and it just doesn't do it.

Is there away to lay it nicely on the background? Here's the url if you want to see what I mean (notice that the arrow on the left is fine because it's right in the image...the one in the menu is the one that ends up deformed and jagged).


Thanks in advance,
 
It appears the the image uses 2 colors, white and red, and that you want to get rid of the white.

In Photoshop use magic wand to select white and delete it. If your canvas color is not set to white, you won't be able to see the white go away, so you might want to copy the image into a new PS doc with a transpatent canvas.

If you switch color mode to indexed, which gif likes a lot, you should see that you now have on one color, red. If you show more than that, you must have something else in the image like other hidden layers. You should merge visible.

If there's no border around the circle, it will look like you just have the arrow when you add transparency and place over a colored background so you might think about bordering the circle in a color that will contrast with your various backgrounds..

When you sove for web - gif, you can reduce the number of colors to the bare minimum.
 
Make sure your Matte option is set to NONE in the save as GIF dialog. You can also save as a PNG file- the transparency rendering is really nice with those.
 
Perfect.....I never messed with the Matte option. However, in the past I've noticed that the png transparency works well when using the image in Flash...but on the web the object has gre behind it?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top