Photoshop peoples.. Transparent GIF's.
 

Transparent GIFs.

Whats the best setting in "Save for Web" that will produce the best looking transparent images that won't look like shit when placed against a background.

If you can't get it to look the way you want, maybe try a .png file. Depends what you are doing.

Young, it depends what color your background is ... are you using a plain background or do you want this graphic to be able to go onto any background? If you've got a light image with a white background and you want to put it onto a black background its really hard to get it perfect ... you could try making the background of your image a totally opposite color to your graphic and page background (ie lime green or bright pink) so you make sure to get every pixel when selecting the colors to make transparent.

If its for a static site with a solid background, make the background of your gif as close to the background of your page as possible. From the color reduction drop down menu in the 'save for web' window select 'adaptive', then select 'diffusion' from the dither menu, and 'diffusion transparency dither' from the transparency menu. I find that gives the smoothest edges.

You might have to save it a few times to see what works best by selecting different colors to make transparent ... just make sure the background of your image isn't the same color as any of the colors you want to keep in the image.

Hope that made some sense ;/

Or...before you even MAKE the image, you can start off with a transparent backgroud. Might help just a little.

Wow, haven't seen you for ages CJ. I dropped past purve.com yesterday to see if you were still alive :D

GIFs are 8bit colour - that is, they have a maximum of 256 colors - so you're gonig to have a hard time representing the entire spectrum. This I assume you know.

While I agree w/ CJ - one thing to point out - if you're trying to make text w/ a transparent background, and your font is anti-aliased, sometimes it's better to select a background color that is similar to the one of the real page, so the edges will blend.

It is also interesting to mention that you can select multiple colours for transparency, so you can control how much you want to 'erode' into your picture, and how much you want transparent.

hey quantum-x
I'm still alive ... barely ;-)

I've even got icq turned on again so hit me up!
3422430

fitz i tried your suggestion earlier to no avail...thanks.
Az thats next on my list..thanks.

Holy shit. Thanks quantum, CJ for the awesome in depth info.

I'm using a static background. So the GIF has to look good while it moves through the background on the scroll down. I'm using TT fonts BUT i've added outlines (gradients) to them.

I'm going to try out a couple of the suggestions given. I read an article about creating transparent images that will fit into Wordpress headers and maintain...but I can't find the link.

I'll be back.

np young ;-)

this is where I would get lazy and change the background color to suit my graphic ;-)

Make the matte color the same color of your background, or it will look like shit.