Topic: How In The World

Ok, How in the world do you get partial transparent images?? I know its possible, and I know some of them can be animated.. because I've seen em... but for the life I cannot get PSP 11 or Jasc Animation Shop 3 to save them correctly, its clearly driving me insane. Is there a way to do it with these programs? if not What programs would I need to do it in?

When you say partial, do you mean translucent? Try saving as PNG.

Other than that I'm not sure what you might mean exactly...

Maybe you don't know how to change opacity/translucency within the program(s) before saving?
Maybe you don't know how to save a GIF or PNG with 8-bit transparency?

and in what are you viewing the saved images? not all user agents will properly render such transparency...

Ok Yes translucent would be the word I am looking for. I have some images, that when I save them as a GIF file, they get destored, the colors change, and they look sloppy, here is one of them http://i63.photobucket.com/albums/h139/cherrybomb9276/butterflyANI2.gif the shadow is suppose to be grey, and yet it is jet black. There also seems to be a loss of quality. I am worse then a beginner when it comes to the programs, because I am not sure of what I am doing, so I experiement. I do not know how to safe with 8-bit transparency, and I don't even know what a PNG file is, or if I can "see". I am also Totaly unsure how to change opacity/transluceny in anything..... so But I will take any help I can get.

I suggest you start by reading up on the file formats on wikipedia - that will give you an idea what's appropriate for what and why this is.

PNG is what you would generally want, but the animated varieties aren't very popularly supported yet; PNG will generally be an option alongside GIF in any decent imaging software.

GIF doesn't support pretty translucency, but you can sort of fake it some ways, such as incorporating a full-canvas background color behind whatever you want to appear translucent (instead of having the 'background' be transparent), or dithering a checkerboard of transparent and not pixels.

If it's just the shadow that needs to be translucent, you could separate that part out as a PNG, and have it display behind a GIF of the main animated butterfly part.

You could use Flash, which is well supported, but proprietary (might not be an issue to you).

You can use JavaScript to animate between separate PNG images.