Antialiasing A Transparent Gif to a Background

[MPoling]

Hi,

I'm using a .gif of a signature file, which I must put into a newsletter template with an orange background. (The template was created before my time, and I don't believe the orange is a websafe color. In any case the template is beyond my control.)

First I took the .gif file and using the color dropper matched it to the background of the newsletter. When I load the gif into the newsletter, the color almost works, but it isn't exactly correct.

Next I made the gif transparent (using flat, stained glass transparency.) So great, that worked fine, but of course there was no antialiasing, so all kinds of white pixels are showing up against the orange background.

I've tried and tried to anti alias the transparent .gif to an orange background, but can't get it to work. I figure that while the not-quite matching color in a rectangual is fairly noticeable, it should be fine enough for the anti-aliased pixels.

When I try to export my gif, the document background color shows up as a color in the export. If I ignore the color, it is exported as a transparent gif with an orange background. If I set the orange background color to transparent, then I'm back to having a signature that is all black and white and not antialiased to the background.

How can I get just the line image in the .gif to antialias to the background color I've set?

Any suggestions?

Thanks for your help.

Monica

[gwpriester]

Hello Monica

Welcome to the Xtreme Conference.

My head is spinning trying to follow all that you have done.

Can you attach the GIF file or your original bitmap so we can have a look at it? I'm sure you can do what you need to do but maybe we are missing something.

One thing to try is to take the signature bitmap (I assume it is just 2 colors) and left click on a color on the screen palette to set the background color.

You can edit the fill color in the Color Editor (Ctrl e) to the exact RGB color.

Gary

[David O'Neil]

First I took the .gif file and using the color dropper matched it to the background of the newsletter. When I load the gif into the newsletter, the color almost works, but it isn't exactly correct.

It sounds like your templated 'orange' is a dithered orange, by your description. Your color dropper picked one of the pixel's colors, but did not catch the other pixel of dithering, and that is probably why the recombination attempt doesn't look quite right. I don't believe Xara will be able to overcome that problem in the way you are trying to do it.

The signature gif is probably black against white, and the 'white' pixels immediately surrounding the signature stroke itself are what you are probably complaining about not being anti-aliased in your further attempts, as they are not pure white, but shades of grey.

The easy solution within Xara is to create the signature as a vector item, and then plunk it onto the orange background. This has the disadvantage of having a constant line width for the signature, but my effort looked quite good in the end, and was acceptable to me.

The other method I'm aware of for fixing this requires another graphics program, such as Paint Shop Pro, that is capable of doing filling and then fine tuning the pixels around the signature using its color replacer tool. A free program that may help is Paint.NET. I have NO experience with it, as I just heard about it yesterday, but it may work.

David

EDIT
PS - You may be able to create an acceptable vector version of the signature using Xara's bitmap tracer. It will require fiddling with settings, as the defaults will probably not work for you.