How do you make Transparent gifs?

[808smokey]

I'm trying to make some of my category and sub-categories have transparent backgrounds. Can someone point me in the right direction? Thanks for the help everyone.

[joeyjgarcia]

It would be easiest to answer this question if you told us which graphics tool you plan to use or are using?

 

In general, you have to save your image in a gif format and select a single color to be transparent. Because this is so general, it won't help unless we know which tool you are using and when we learn that we'll probably respond with a URL that is a tutorial for make these with that tool.

 

If you don't already have a graphic tool, it is a MUST HAVE for webmasters/store administrators. Get one that is a commonly used one that is not some piece of crap that came with another tool such as a video card's bonus application. Most people use JASC's Paint Shop Pro or Ulead's PhotoImpact.

 

Joey Garcai

[adiwillow]

i think you'll find most people use photoshop or fireworks :D

 

both are difficult to learn though for a first time user....

[joeyjgarcia]

Those are two TOP NOTCH applications and definitely way too much for you needs of just creating a transparent gif. It is like buying a corvette to go to the store.

 

My earlier suggestions are less than $100, and if you look around you could find them for even less than $50.

 

PhotoShop will cost around $500, Fireworks is around $300. That is a lot of money for a lot of frustration.

 

Start small (baby steps) then out grow what you have.

 

Personally, I like Ulead's PhotoImpact (www.ulead.com) and there are many support sites with excellent tutorials. One of the best is: http://www.eastofthesun.com by a lady named Shephanie (don't know her last name).

 

Good luck!

[808smokey]

Well I already Fireworks MX 2004. I used the tutorial/help and I can get it to go transparent but it shows up as a static picture on my site

here's link to it It's burning computer for my tech support page. I changed the name of it to table_background_specials.gif to replace the standard OSC pic "the little guy with his arms up". Anyways I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Fireworks makes all the file extensions .PNG so maybe that's why? I changed it to table_background_specials.gif and it still only static pic. The animated pic is only 6 frames so does that mean I have to load the 6 different pics to get it to animate??

[211655]

very simple:

 

btw fireworks is the best software for designing any website. in term of image work.

 

now ur help:

when u create the image, u will create them in frames if u want to have them autometically changing etc...

 

so do this...

file

export

>animated gif

>next.... follow trail

and at end click export, it will save the file as animated gif which os what u want.

[Chris Dunning]

Why make a transparent .gif when you already have one? It's called pixel_trans.gif and it's in your images directory unless you deleted it. You can expand it to be any size you want it to. This is all the tep_draw_seperator() function does - draws a transparent .gif in the specified size.