The elusive Transparency

[inphoenix]

CorelDraw 9 image to jpeg to be used in a Delphi application. I can't seem to get rid of the white background. I've tried converting to bitmapped, no luck, the only time I've been able to get transparency is to 'edit bitmap' and save from the PP file and it merges layers but in the Delphi app the file is all 'messed' up.... lots of differenct colored lines leaving the image unusable. I've tried converting to .bmp and .jpg but no transparency. Any ideas?????

thank you,
Marie [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_confused.gif[/img]

[inphoenix]

CorelDraw 9 image to jpeg to be used in a Delphi application. I can't seem to get rid of the white background. I've tried converting to bitmapped, no luck, the only time I've been able to get transparency is to 'edit bitmap' and save from the PP file and it merges layers but in the Delphi app the file is all 'messed' up.... lots of differenct colored lines leaving the image unusable. I've tried converting to .bmp and .jpg but no transparency. Any ideas?????

thank you,
Marie [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_confused.gif[/img]

[Peter Clifton]

Hello Marie

BMP and JPEG do not support transparency.

GIF supports transparency, but only with one index colour, so if you have an anti-aliased image you will get a 'halo' effect. GIF is only 8 bit (256 colour) format.

If Delphi supports it you could try using TIFF or PNG with an alpha channel mask present.

A common way to overcome this is to workout what colour background the image is destined to be placed on and create the object on that colour background in Photo-Paint. Remember to flatten (combine objects with background) prior to exporting.

Peter

[inphoenix]

Thank you Peter, so much. I didn't know that jpeg/bmp could not be transparent. I did the PP thing but failed to flatten b4 saving, I let the save do it so that was probably my problem with the funny file. I also tried the bacground the same color I thought the application would use but my husband said he was concerned about monitor variances because the app will run on many and I hope many many many monitors.

[Peter Clifton]

Marie

I use a wonderful, very small (blink and you will miss the download) utility called 'Color Cop' it is free to use and can be found at

Color Cop Home Page

This is a modeless pick tool to sample on screen colours.

Make sure when working in either Photopaint or another application that all colour managment is disabled and your Photo-Paint image is in RGB colour space

Use the pick tool in Color Cop to sample the background the image you are creating will be placed on and feed these values into the background of your Photo-Paint image.

Of course it doesn't take into account the fact that the user may chage the system colours and therefore possibly the background the image will be displayed on in the program, but it is a great tool none the less. But all things equal it should not matter what monitor the image is displayed on as the Image background will have the same RGB background as the program.

Hope this helps

Peter