I like to know how i can cut JPG/GIF images exactly around their borders in such a way that there are no backgrounds left (pictures are not straight boxes but have irregulair borders).

Why do i want this:

I have a tiled background made of gif.s
The colour is antracite/brown and each pixel has 1 out of 6 grades of colour

Please look at my background here:

www.tetrascanner.com)
Now if i want to put a picture (with 'wite' borders) on top of this background without the wite borders being visible i have various
options of wich none seems to be good:

1) In Sitespinner: just put the picture on
top of the background and cover the 'wite'
piecies with pieces of background,

'NO GOOD" because i need to make to much
gif's wich all have to be downloaded by the
visitor's (this looks ugly and takes to
much page-load -time)
If i have the same picture somewhere else
on my website i will have to do the same
again

2) Import picture into "paint" wich is a
standard painting program part of windows Xp

There i can "paste" all 'wite" borders
with pieces of background material
(small cuts)
it looks perfect in 'paint'
Then i have to save it ..so i can use it,
When saving it as 'gif' i lose quality
And when i put this image on top of the
background you see a difference between
the background and the picture surroundings
caused by a) resizing b)quality difference

The original picture is jpg-format and the background is gif-format

So best would be to cut the picture exactly from it's background ( not shure if you call this "transparent")

I do'nt know if this is possible and how to do that

Anyone ?

Tnx very much

ps) how to insert an image in this message
(forum) not url ?

Ron

Hi Ron,

Don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure the JPEG format dosn't support or understand transparency as a "Colour". If you want a transparent image (eg. everything not covered by the image can be seen from the underneath layer)then you need to have a Gif file or a PNG file. Both of these formats have a transparent option (I believe gif only allows 256 colours though, but I could be wrong)

You can convert jpg to GIF or PNG through many differnet paint programs. Some even allow you to specify a colour and turn it to transparent. If that is the case with your JPG then it's propable the best option.

Derry, any other ideas?

Ray
ps. I hope it's alright to reply, I had the same "How the heck to I create tranparency" issue a while back and research it a bit.

Yes... You are almost right on this Ray, except that .jpg does not suport transparancy at all. However, I do not know if this applies to the new .jpg2000... but I suspect that it does.

re: "ps. I hope it's alright to reply..."

Yes, by all means. Anyone who knows the answer or has a suggestion or comment, feel free to jump in to any question, anytime.