Creating Transparent PNG Clip Art

[Marti]

Two Questions: On 09-30-06, Lee Otsubo, The Digital Photo Guy, attached a file to his post that was a tutorial on "Creating Transparent PNG Clip Art". I clicked on the attachment for the Adobe Acrobat tutorial, but my computer says there was an error and I can't get to it. 1.) How can I get to that tutorial? Also, Lee mentioned that his tutorial required some form of Photoshop Elements. I have Photoshop 5.5, not Elements. 2.) Will 5.5 work too?

Thanks a lot!
Marti, a SBM Newbie

P.S. There's an icon in Microsoft PowerPoint that makes a JPG image transparent and then I save the image as a PNG. But this process doesn't seem to always work for clip art that I'm dragging 'n dropping in SBM.

[digimac]

in photoshop, as long as you start out with a transparent background...then create your clipart/elements/whatever...then you can save it as a .PNG file just as if you were saving it as a .jpg or any other file. You just need to pull the drop down menu for the file extension you want when you are saving it.

[DGehman]

Does Photoshop 5.5 support PNG for output? Photoshop 5.5 was released in 1999, while the PNG standard was first introduced in 1996 and caught on very slowly.

If it does, the type you want may be called "24 bit color PNG plus alpha." Less technical programs just call it "transparent PNG."

The free graphics utility Irfanview can take many different kinds of graphics (with or without transparent backgrounds) and save them as transparent PNGs. It uses some of the conventions that are familiar with transparent GIFs, such as giving you a screen where you click the color you want treated as transparent.

(Irfanview gives you 2 flavors - a built-in transparent PNG that is simple and direct, and a plug-in that contains the most geeky of details -- a pro would enjoy the latter, but I'm not a pro).

Other programs appears to select white automatically for the transparency. Still others (of Photoshop power) keep track of the alpha channel or create one, is ways still mysterious to me.

Irfanview is at http://www.irfanview.com

Forgot to mention - the link on http://www.scrapbookmax.com/forums/s...ead.php?t=2060 worked just fine for me. Lately, Acrobat reader has taken to urging me to update and sometimes appears to lock up because it cleverly hides the update dialog behind other screens, where you can't click "No, thanks, no more Acrobat updates for me..." Button doesn't actually say that, nor do I, but that's my intent when I'm being polite.

[Marion]

Try this......

http://www.scrapbookmax.com/forums/s...highlight=gimp

Gimp is free and Gimp is my choice for making images transparent quick and easy! Follow Linda's easy steps and you can do this within minutes!

[Marti]

Thanks to all of you for addressing my questions so quickly. As it turned out, I found another tutorial on SBM (sadly, I can't tell you right now whose it was) and opened my Photoshop 5.5, followed the instructions on that tutorial and - low and behold - was able to make all my .jpg clip art into transparent .png's in a snap. And yes, the "Save to Web" feature that brings up a transparency window in 5.5 only allows me to use a PNG-24, not 25, but it made no difference. It worked fine.

Thanks to everyone who offered other solutions too, as well as offering other sites that I could use to achieve the same results. I'm going to try them all. You guys are really great and this site is wonderful! I'm so glad I found you! And a special thanks to Wisconsin Marion!

Your new digi scrapbooking buddy,
Marti

[digimac]

So glad you figured it out Marti! Happy scrappin'!