Created July 22, 2003 ©
Copyright Moon's Designs
Property of Moon's Designs
This is my creation, any similarity to other
tutorials on the Internet is unintentional.
Please do not copy or place this tutorial or any
graphics to any other place without written permission
directly from me. Thank you.
This tutorial is written in and for
PSP8.01 and assumes you have a working knowledge
of PSP at a beginners level.
YOU WILL NEED:
JASC's PSP8 (30 day free trial) - You
can get it HERE
Screenshots are resized and compressed
for faster loading.
There are many people that aren't
sure how to make a transparent gif in PSP8. This
is a very basic tutorial, written by request, we
will be using the GIF Optimizer. When I used PSP7
I personally found the Gif Optimizer Wizard very
easy and it gave great results. In PSP8 I do not
advise using the Wizard. In this tutorial I will
show you how to use the options in the different
tabs in the Optimizer where you can preview exactly
how your gif will look in response to the changes
in your settings.
Many times, when following a
tutorial, we want to save our finished product as
a gif, however we aren't sure what color background
we will be using for putting it on a website. I
made the triangle, at the top of this page, with
that in mind and it blends in perfectly with this
background.
Step 1:
Open a new image (File/New Image). For this tutorial
I made my new image 150x150 pixels, 200 resolution,
raster layer and transparent background.
Step 2:
Set your background material to a gradient. I used
the mint gradient, linear style, 0 angle and 0 repeats.
It doesn't matter what you have your foreground
material set at, as we are going to be using a 0
line width when we draw out our preset.
Step 3:
Activate your preset shapes tool, 
.
I used the triangle shape, antialias checked, retain
style and create as vector unchecked, line width
0.
Draw out a triangle on your image.
Step 4:
I then added an inner bevel. Go to Effects/3D Effects/Inner
Bevel. I used the Gel-Like Preset that came with
PSP8. I have a screenshot below.
Here is how my triangle now looks.
Step 5:
Let's save this as a gif, using the Gif Optimizer.
Go to File/Export/GIF Optimizer. You will get this
dialog box.
There are a number of tabs in
your optimizer that I will go over. It's not real
clear in the screenshot, but when you look at yours
with the default setting it looks awful. However,
by adjusting settings in the different tabs we can
make it look great.
Transparency Tab - I keep my
set at Existing image or layer transparency on the
Transparency Tab.
Step 6:
Next click on the Colors Tab. We will go back to
the Partial Transparency, if needed, in the next
step. Set your dithering to 0% and choose the Optimized
Octree option for the color selection. Look at how
much better it is looking.
Step 7:
Click on the Partial Transparency tab. Depending
on the graphic you may have some black jaggie areas
around your object. I moved my dialog box over so
my graphic could be viewed. Holding your mouse over
the graphic you can choose a color from your graphic,
left click and your outline won't have the jaggies,
as it will blend in with the background. Make sure
that Yes, blend with background color is checked.
Step 8:
Format tab. I left at the default.
Step 9:
Download Tab. This tells you how long it will take
your gif to download on various modem speeds and
types.
Click OK and you can save your
gif in the folder of your choice.
I hope this short tutorial helps
you understand transparent gifs a little better.
If you have
any problems, comments or questions please do not
hesitate to E-mail
me.
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Tutorial
written and created by Patti Wavinak for Moon's
Designs. These Tutorials are copyrighted by law.
You may LINK to them only. You may not remove any
of the graphics, zip files or html within these
pages to reproduce these Tutorials, without the
expressed permission of Moon's Designs. These pages
may not be removed from this website and sent via
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YahooGroups or other mailing list sites, nor may
they be translated and placed on another site.
Creations made from these tutorials are your creations.
Moon's Designs holds the copyright to all selections,
original tubes and original images that I have created
and provided for use within my tutorials. Page backgrounds
and images are created exclusively for this website
and may not be downloaded or used without written
permission.
If you would like to use any of my tutorials for
group lessons please contact
me.
Established
April, 2001
© Copyright 2001-2003 Moon's Designs "All
rights reserved"
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