Transparent images

[Don]

I'm in the middle of creating a marquee but am having a problem sourcing transparent arcade character images. What I mean by that is an image that has no set 'background' and can be layered on another image. Is there a name for these type of files or a database I'm unaware of?? Where do you guys get all the character images for your marquees and other art?

P.S. I've attached my work in progress marquee if you guys wanna have a look

Cheers!

[andrewbean90]

export it to jpeg aka .jpg and flatten the image

[gryhnd]

I'm in the middle of creating a marquee but am having a problem sourcing transparent arcade character images. What I mean by that is an image that has no set 'background' and can be layered on another image. Is there a name for these type of files or a database I'm unaware of?? Where do you guys get all the character images for your marquees and other art?

P.S. I've attached my work in progress marquee if you guys wanna have a look

Cheers!

Transparency can be found most commonly in GIF, PNG, and PSD (photoshop). GIF, however, only has a palette of 256 colors which can render many images "grainy", whereas the others are generally "full color".

With the right tools, though, you can typically cut an area of interest out and/or delete the background of any image to transparency. In GIMP, for example, I often use the scissors tool to excise an area of interest with a minimum of work.  Or, if the background is a fairly consistent color, you can go to Layer/Transparency/Color-to-alpha, and it will convert a chosen color in the image to transparency. Crop it, and move on to the next phase.

[drventure]

Also depends on the app you're using.

For instance, Mala supports transparency, but in a bit of an old school way. Basically, whatever color pixel in set to the bottommost leftmost pixel is the "transparent color" and Mala renders all pixels of that color as transparent.

Thus, the image itself doesn't have any transparency, but all the areas that you want to be transparent will typically be colored some garish color (like purple or light blue).

But again, that's just a limitation of Mala's renderer.

Loadman, correct me if I'm wrong!

[Blanka]

If you work in a vector editor (freehand, illustrator, inkscape) all items are "set free" by default and can be put on top of each other with ease. The paper is transparent. So if you export to PNG, all that still looks paper-white will be translucent in the PNG.
Check the arcade vectorlib for tons of vector-files of your fav characters.

[Don]

Thanks all. I installed GIMP and can now make the background transparent on images . The front end im using is AtomicFE and it also has that method of transparency, i.e. you chose one colour and it makes all those pixels transparent.