Chaps,

I've seen many of you have a small "transparent" pic as avatar, I guess it has to be a GIF in order to get transparency, right? Good examples that come to my mind - Jasper's, Hellfire's..

What tool did you use to generate it? Jasper's surely comes from a photograph..

I'd like mine to look neater, without a background.

Cheers,

Alex

Alez

First off, yes, it does need to be a .gif as .jpg doesn't support transparency in the same way.

You can use Paint Shop Pro to do it (www.jasc.com)

-'paint' everything you want to be transparent with a nice bold colour (bright red works well).
- reduce it to 256 colours (.gif only supports 256). this is in "colours -> decrease colour depth -> 256 colours"
- choose "colours -> set pallete transparency" and click the bold colour you painted in. When you hit ok the bold coloured area will disapear
- save as a .gif file and you're done.

It takes a bit of practice to get it right!

Chris

Excellent, many thanks Chris!