How to make a Transparent background?

Zascar

Hello,

On my site www.digital.dj - I have a grey background. It's annoying cause many of the photos I have on it have white backgrounds and they do not blend in. I have to put a box around them and it does not look as good. I can get around this by having a transparent background. If you scroll towards the end of the page you will see the "Numark Total Control" and the "Behringer BCD3000" have transparent backgrounds - however I found these images like this.

I have tried to do this with the images at the top but cannot manage it for some reason. I use paind shop pro, delete the background (i get the grey and white boxes meaning transparent background) I save as a .gif, but when I put it on my site it still has a white background....

What could I be doing wrong?

Gordon

That particular image is a .png image. And I need to point out that actually that image doesn't display any transparency in certain versions of Internet Explorer, so is technically not 100% transparent.

I don't use PSP but use Photoshop. In photoshop to make a transparent png filr you would delete the background and save it as a png file in the Save for Web or Save As file menu.

You can also save as a gif but you need to stipulate transparency in the save options which I am not sure if PSP has.

I tend not to use transparent backgrounds in web work as pngs don't all show up as transparent and gifs produce bad round edge transparency. This is because they have no varying levels of opacity (its just transparent or not transparent) called the "alpha channel" which is what png files have.

I would suggest this gets moved to the Webmaster forum and you can pick their brains on transparency in webdesign imagery.

5uspect

When you save the GIF make sure that the transparency option is ticked.

Or instead of just deleting the background just make it the colour of your page. Not particularly useful if you plan on changing your page design in future tho.

Gordon

5uspect wrote:

Or instead of just deleting the background just make it the colour of your page. Not particularly useful if you plan on changing your page design in future tho.

Actually that may be the best option if you are using Photoshop. You would need to save all the image .psd files and then when it comes to changing all the images background colours you would then create an action on Photoshop and a batch based on that action that would do this:

Create new layer
Move layer to back
fill layer with new BG colour
save for web

And batch that action onto your psd files.

5uspect

True, you could quickly churn out new images that way. There's also the advantage of better image quality compared to GIFs.

Its down and dirty and simply ignores the transparency issue.

I'd imagine you could do the same in PSP, but I can't stand that program!