Transparent Gifs are very popular and useful in many cases. There are many ways do do this I will show you in three of the most common programs that I use...LView Pro, GIf Construction Set & Adobe Photoshop.

• First I must tell you a hint on creating a transparent gif. The whole idea is that you pick one of the colors in your image to be transparent, therefore, this color should not be a color that you plan on seeing. Here is an example:

  

  I created this image knowing that I had to have a transparent background. Now your first impression would be to color the background white, right? No, I colored it gray for a reason. If I would have created this image on a white background, and later selected the white as my transparent color, the white lettering would have also disappeared. Always pick a background color that is not in your original image.

  After selecting the gray as my transparent color, the image looked like this on the homepage:

  

If you have created and saved your image, you are now ready to make it transparent. You may do it with one of the following programs:

LViewPro - Open your image in LView. Now click on "Retouch" or the R and select Background Color. You will now see a panel that contains all of the colors in your image. Click on the color that you will be making transparent. You will notice that your original image changes to a black and white picture. Look at it closely and you will see that the area in black (or white if you have that checked) will be the area that will be transparent. If you are satisfied with your choice, save your image. You will be asked if you want to save it in GIf89a format. Click on Yes and your done!

Gif Construction Set - Open up "GCS" and open your image. Double-click on the "Control" text and you will see a box with many options on it. Check the "Transparent Color" box and click on the little eye dropper icon. Your image will be displayed and you may select the color that will be transparent. Once selected, hit OK. You may now view your image by clicking on the "VIEW" tab. If you are satisfied with the results, save the image and you are done.

Adobe Photoshop - To be able to create a transparent gif in Photoshop, you must have the Gif89 export filter. This comes with versions 3.05 and above. Once you have the plug-in saved in your filters directory you are ready to go. Open your image and select FILE/EXPORT/GIF*( EXPORT. There are two ways this filter works. If your image is saved in "index" colors, you can select the colors to be transparent directly from your image or by selecting your colors from the choices below. If your image is an RGB image, then it must be on an actual layer - not on the "background" layer. Anything that is transparent on the layer (where the gray and white checkerboard shows through) will be the area that will be the transparent color as a gif. Export you image, and you are done. FYI - Photoshop will save your transparent color as the default gray if you do not specify another color. To do so, click on the gray box in the export pop-up window. This will give you the color palette and you may pick any color known to man. Click ok, and then ok again to save the image.

I hope this helps, if you have any other questions, feel free to ask me.