Understanding how Transparent Gif's work in PSP - Page 2

Now, I realise PSP has built-in transparent gif optimisers, yada yada yada. However, I've never been completely happy with the results I've got from creating transparent images this way, so I still resort to a good 'old-fashioned' method I learnt a long time ago from wiser heads. So here we go . . .

1.  O.k, the first thing you will need to do is to download the image we'll be working with, you can grab it from right here. It's a Winzip file which will be self-extracting even if you don't already have WinZip installed. Just double-click on it to open it, and extract it to your desktop (or wherever else you prefer to keep it). Once it's extracted you can open it up in PSP.

2.  This is what you'll see (below, far left). It looks very pretty and all, but this is an image we created and saved for our web page last week. This week, we've decided to go with a different color background for our web page (Yes, I can just hear Homer Simpson going, "Doh!!" ;-) So what to do huh? Well, that rosey pink background will just have to disappear... Click on the eyedropper tool, and then right-click on the pink background in the image (as shown below). Voila! Look what happens to the background color on the materials palette (see below right). What we've just done is told PSP that we'll be working with a background color that is pink. As I mentioned earlier, PSP can't change anything to transparent without it knowing what color it has to change, so that's what we've just done. But now we have to get rid of it...

Click on the eyedropper tool and run the mouse over the pink until you see the eyedropper appear. Right-click and voila. . .

Watch your background color on the materials palette change to pink. As you can see, my original background was white. . .

Boom - now it's changed to pink.

3.  Now it's time to decrease the color depth of our image (or, in other words, tell PSP we're preparing this image for transparency). Go to Image>Decrease Color Depth>256 Colors (8 bit). This will bring up the dialogue box you see below. Make sure you have these settings selected: Optimized Octree, Error Diffusion and Reduce Color Bleeding, and click OK:

4.  Go to Image>Palette>Set Palette Transparency. Make sure you have Set the Transparency Value to the Current Background Color selected, and hit OK. If you'd like to see if it actually worked or not, you can click on the Proof button first (see below).

From this . . .

To this (proofed) . . .

To THIS!

5.  And finally, most important of all - don't forget to save it as a .gif!

Important: After you save your transparent gif it will still appear in PSP as having a solid background, and will also appear in the PSP browser with a solid background, even after you've gone through the above steps and saved it as a gif. However, the solid background WILL become transparent if viewed on a web page - I guarantee it. Remember, the chequerboard only demonstrates transparency within PSP itself - not transparency for the web, so this is most likely why it doesn't show the chequerboard at all when viewed in PSP or the browser.