digibutter.nerr

[LvKeulen]

Update: There's now also a Paint.NET tutorial available at the bottom of this GIMP tutorial.
It's way easier than using the GIMP to transparent it. Check it out!

Update: I made a transparenting tutorial for Photoshop 7.
It's at the bottom of the Paint.NET tutorial.

Also, if something is still unclear, or your software isn't added yet,
feel free to drop a PM.


A lot of people wonder how to eliminate the evil white boxes around their images, also known as transparency.
It's Evil white boxes because they are evil. XD
Anyway, since some people don't want to go and buy PS7, you can also use 'The GIMP', which is free.
The GIMP for Windows (installer) can be downloaded here.

Before you go and ask what these slider things in my titlebars are, it's from a program called TransparentWindows. To make windows transparent. XD

Using this GIMP, I made this tutorial.
Now let's start!
First off, you'll need some image to transparent.
For this tutorial, I'll use this one.
The dimensions (lol dimensions) are 378x378 pixels.
Got it copied? Yes? Good.
Now open up the GIMP you just downloaded.
After loading and booting up, you'll get two windows. One with the tools and stuff in it, and a 'layers, channels, blah blah etc' window.
But we don't need this layers window yet, so let's stick to the main window.
The main window called 'The GIMP' has a 'File' button.
Hit it and select 'New'.

That one!
Click it and a new window will pop up.
Of course, you'll have to set the height and width to 378x378.

Like this!

A new window will pop up. Copy and paste the example image I used (or something else with a white box). I use this example image because it's very easy to transparent for a first try. Again, it can be found here.

Important: Hotkeys
Hotkeys are very nice to use. If you don't know them, they are:
Ctrl+A: Select everything on a certain page (you can select the example image that way)
Ctrl+C: Copy a selected image or selected text
Ctrl+V: Paste something like a random image or text
Ctrl+Z: Undo your last action(s)

Now copy it and paste it in your new, empty white window.
Press Ctrl+V and now you see your example image in this white box.
Now select the magic wand:

That's the magic wand!

Now you might wonder what this 'Threshold' box is for.
Well, let's say you have a yellow background, fading into a darker yellow.

Like that!

If you set the treshold on it's lowest, it only selects the color that you click.
Like the darkest shade of yellow, but it doesn't select the lighter one.
The higher you set it, the more similar colors it will select.
So you'll select all the shades of yellow. Try copying that one in a new window and test it! Don't forget to deselect by clicking Select > None or pressing Shift+Ctrl+A.
After selecting something you can drag it around.
You can undo this with earlier said hotkey: Ctrl+Z or Edit > Undo.

Now, back to our box!
Remember that the GIMP has three windows?
Go and check out the Layers one. It has two layers:
One is a floating selection (pasted layer) also known as the box, the second one is the background, which is white.
The background is always white, but if we don't remove it we can't transparent our nice box. So what do you do? You rightclick your floating selection and press 'Anchor Layer'. Now it gets anchored on your Background layer. (Note that this only works with floating selections such as pasted images: if you want to merge normal layers you need to rightclick and press 'Merge Down', so it merges with the layer below the layer you want to merge.


Tadah! If you click this button, you'll be left with only one layer.
Now go back to the window with your box in it.
Since we now know how the magic wand works (it selects similiar colors)
we are going to use it on that background of the box.
Now, right click our new layer and click 'Add Alpha Channel'. This is used to transparent our image. If we don't do this, we'll still have the white box. So it's important!


Don't skip this step! Or your transparency is not going to work.

Now what? Well, go back to your box. Make sure nothing is selected!
Click your box and press Shift+Ctrl+A, or just go to Select > None.
Now click on your magic wand tool. Set the threshold to 6. If you set it too high, it will select the outlines of your box. Why? Because that color is dark as well, so it will get selected. For this one, you can even set your threshold to '1', because the background only has one color.
A reason why you might want to make that threshold higher is for images with ugly JPEG-relics.
What are JPEG relics, you ask?

See how it bleeds colors?

If you save something as a low-quality JPEG (MS Paint is notorious for that) you'll get something like that. Which isn't a good thing.

Back to our box! Now that we deselected everything and we've set our magic wand's threshold to 1 or 6 or whatever low number, you can click the background of the box.

Note: If you hold 'SHIFT' and click another color, that gets selected as well! Useful if you want to select more colors.
If you hold 'CTRL' and click a color, it gets deselected. Nifty!
You can also hold 'ALT' to move your current selection. Wow!

Well, alright, maybe it isn't that cool. But it's sure a cool feature!
Some other tools can use the CTRL/ALT/SHIFT keys as well. You can try it out later.

Back to our box again, which we selected so nice.
We need to clear the background. How? Well, it isn't the 'DEL' key, if you expected that. No, the GIMP uses Ctrl+K, also known as 'Clear'. You can find it as well in Edit > Clear.

If you followed the tutorial correctly, the background will be checkered.

You did it right! Woohoo!

If your background is still white, you might have skipped the
'Add Alpha Channel' part. You might want to reread and redo this tutorial in that case.

If you did it right, you can now save it! Yes!

As Resetti would have said it: SAVE! SAVE! SAAAVE!

Now you'll get a lot of options.
First, give it a filename in the top box.
I named it 'MyFirstTransparency'.
Notice: Don't forget to put '.png' in the end of your filename, or else it'll just get saved as 'MyFirstTransparency' without an extension.
How to fix it if you did it anyway? Just put .png in the end of your file.

It says 'Save in Folder: Mijn Afbeeldingen'. That's 'My Images' for the English people out there
Next, there is the '[+] Browse for other folders' thing.
If you click it, you can select another folder if you want to save it elsewhere.

Next, click the [+] to the left of the 'Select File Type' thing. Use 'PNG image' as shown in the image below.


This is it! The final step!

Now press save and you'll get a lot of crazy options.
I don't know what half of these things mean, but 'Compression level' might be important. The higher you set it, the smaller your filetype.
But nobody cares, so just hit 'OK'. Your image is saved!
Now go upload it to Imageshack or Tinypic (whatever you want.)
Now put your 'direct link to image' between the [ img] and [/img] tags.


Your transparent box! Excellent!

This has been a random tutorial by LvKeulen.
Written per request by 'Dimentio'.
Feel free to post it somewhere else if you feel like it.

Paint.NET Tutorial
Why is there all of a sudden a Paint.NET tutorial in here?
BECAUSE FRANIS SED SO, THAT'S WAI.
Now let's start by downloading Paint.NET, shall we?
Do it here.
Now you have this shiny new copy of Paint.NET, install and open it.


Your new copy of Paint.NET!
I downsized it a bit so it'd eat less bandwidth.

You have the Tools (top left), which contains the tools, of course.
There's the Colors (bottom left), which is used to select colors. Easy, right?
There's the History (top right), it shows all of your last actions. Like selecting, drawing something, pasting, erasing, etc.
Again, you can undo your last actions by hitting Ctrl+Z (Or using Edit > Undo).
Last, the 'Layers' window which only has a white background layer in it.
Layers are what they are: layers.
You can create outlines for a drawing or something in one layer, then create the colors in another one. This is so everything you drew in the outline layer doesn't get screwed up.

Now, we'll use the same freaking box again. Whee.
By box, I mean this image.
Again, because it's easy to use as your first image to make transparent.
Let's move on!

Start by copying that box image. Either by rightclicking it and hitting 'Copy' or selecting it and pressing Ctrl+C. Here's a list of hotkeys again:

Hotkeys
Copied from my GIMP tutorial above.
Hotkeys are very nice to use. If you don't know them, they are:
Ctrl+A: Select everything on a certain page (you can select the example image that way)
Ctrl+C: Copy a selected image or selected text
Ctrl+V: Paste something like a random image or text
Ctrl+Z: Undo your last action(s)

Good. Now that your image is copied, hit File > New in Paint.NET.


Press it! Do it now!

Again, you'll need to set the resolution. Use the same resolution as the box has! Find out the resolution (width x height) by rightclicking your file and hitting 'Properties' (which also works for images on the Internet).

Set it like this. Nobody cares about the other options: you only need to set the width and height.

Now, if you didn't copy your box already, copy it. Now paste it in your
Paint.NET canvas! Hit Ctrl+V or press Edit > Paste.
You'll see that in your 'Layers' window your white background is now
that box. If you want it in a new layer (which we aren't going to do in this tutorial),
just hit the New Layer button. It's in the bottom left of your 'Layers' window.
TIP: You can also use CTRL+SHIFT+N.
AGAIN: You don't need this to transparent your image.
It's just so you know.

You can also close the 'Colors' and 'History' boxes for now.
You won't need them in this tutorial. If you want them to return,
go to Window > History / Colors.
You can also turn them on and off by pressing the keys F5~F8.

Now that we've pasted this thing, deselect it.
Do this by hitting Ctrl+D or using Edit > Deselect.
This is to avoid things screwing up.

Next up: The magic wand tool! It's the tool I circled in this image.

It's the magic wand tool!
What does it do? It selects similar colors. The Magic Wand is awesome.
The other thing I circled is the 'Tolerance' box.
The higher you set the tolerance, the more similar colors it'll select.
This is nice when you need to select different shades of a color; just
set the tolerance higher for things like that.
But because the box's background only has one color, we are setting
the tolerance from 1 to 10% (it doesn't matter much).

With everything deselected, use the magic wand and click the background.

You selected that annoying background! Hooray!

Now the only thing you need to do is hit the 'Del/Delete' key
or use Edit > Erase selection.
If you did it right, your background will be checkered!

Now you are almost done! Hit File > Save As.
Now give it a name and save it as a PNG image.
Way easier than using the GIMP, no?


Your finished image. Success!

Written BECUZ FRANIS SED SO.
Made out of pure boredom.

Photoshop 7 Tutorial
Boredom ensues. Made for the people with Photoshop 7.

I'm not going to say where you can get Photoshop or
Francis will use the BanHammerâ„¢ on me. Seriously.

Assuming you already have PS7, let's start.

First off, we need our pretty cube. What cube?
This cube.
This will be the image we will transparent. For the third time.
Don't start PS7 yet. First off, copy the image of the box.
This is so PS7 will automatically detect the dimensions of your copied image. That's fran-tastic, is it not? (lol franis)

Assuming that you have copied the box, start PS7.

Like that! Or else you are doing it wrong.

I've circled the stuff that matters. If you copied the box before starting PS7
(like I told you to do) the dimensions should have been set correctly.
Else, set to 378x378 as the image says.
Also note the other circle: The 'contents' are set to 'Transparent'.
If you set it to white, your background'll be white, and you'll have to delete it and stuff.
So basically: the contents are what your empty image looks like.
Either 'White': A white (locked) layer;
Or 'Background Color': The secondary color you have selected. This is also white by default.

What's a secondary color? (Skip to the ---- if you don't care)

See the two squares I circled? The top one (black) is your primary color,
and the bottom one (white) is your secondary one. So if you'd set the
'contents' to 'Background color', your canvas color will be whatever color
you selected this secondary color to be. If you clicked it and made it red,
your background would be red. What a long explanation for such a simple option!
Oh, I'm yapping too much. Back to the actual tutorial!
---Uninteresting stuff ends here---

The last option you can set in the 'contents is
'Transparent': Just one empty, transparent layer. That is what we want.
Go and set it to transparent, alright?

Hit 'OK' and paste your image on the new canvas. Hit Ctrl+V or use Edit > Paste.
Again, here are the hotkeys to select all, copy, paste and to undo.

Hotkeys
Copied from my GIMP tutorial above.
Hotkeys are very nice to use. If you don't know them, they are:
Ctrl+A: Select everything on a certain page (you can select the example image that way)
Ctrl+C: Copy a selected image or selected text
Ctrl+V: Paste something like a random image or text
Ctrl+Z: Undo your last action(s)

Good. You seem to have pasted this beautiful box.
Now that it's inside PS7, this is what you should have:

And select that Magic Wand!

As it's pasted, you might have noticed how your box is the only layer
available. This is because you set the contents in the first step to 'Transparent'.
Didn't that save you a lot of trouble? Yes, it did.

Now, assuming that you have the Magic Wand selected, as shown in
the image above. The other thing I circled is 'Tolerance'.
You can set it from 0 to 255. The higher the tolerance, the more similar colors it will select.
Let's say you have only 1 shade of a color (like the background of a sprite
made in MS Paint) then you can use a tolerance from 0 to 10, or 15.
If you have a lot of different shades of the same color, you can
set the tolerance higher. But not here; this box's background only has 1 shade.
That's why we use this box: It's easy to transparent.

So go and set your tolerance to 10. Assuming you have everything
deselected (Ctrl+D or Select > Deselect), use the magic wand and click
the background of that ugly box.

Cool to know: (Skip to the ----- if you don't want to read this)
If you select something with the magic wand, and then hold SHIFT,
you can select more things at once! Cool feature if you need to
select more things at once, like all the sides of that cube.

If you select something and with the magic wand and hold ALT,
you can substract from your current selection. Nice if you have selected
something unwanted!

Also, when you select something and hold CTRL and drag,
you can move around your selection inside the current layer.
Cool if you have selected the box and want to move it around a bit!

I'm yapping too much stuff you don't need again.
*ahem* Let's move on.
----Uninteresting stuff ends here----


Assuming your selection looks like this:

Does it look like this?

If your selection looks like that, you've done it right.
Hit the 'Del/Delete' key on your keyboard (You can't do it with the Edit menu).

If done correctly, your background is checkered!
Now deselect everything by hitting Ctrl+D or using Select > Deselect.
Your final product should look like this before you save:


You've done it right!

Does it look like that? If it does, be proud of yourself! Woo!
Now to save it!


This is it! Final step!

Now.. See the parts I circled?
The most important is the first one: you must save it as a .PNG image.
The second one is 'Save as a Copy'. If you check it, your image will be saved as
filename copy.png instead of filename.png. You decide if you want to
check this or not.
The last one is 'Use lower case Extension'. If you turn this on, it gets saved as
filename.png. If unchecked, it'll be saved as filename.PNG.
I recommend checking that box. Why? I don't know.

Hit the Save button and upload your image to Imageshack or Tinypic or whatever.


Finalized image! It's over 9000!

This has been YET ANOTHER TUTORIAL made out of BOREDOM.

I hope you found this tutorial useful.
Also, I'd like to point out that 3+6=franis.
Now I'd like to end this tutorial with a blast!
[insert sexy blast here.]

And last off;
DON'T YOU DARE AND POST TL;DR.

[Francis]

Great tutorial. Although I think Paint.NET ( http://www.getpaint.net/ ) is easier to use than GIMP. But the same concepts apply to most programs.

[LvKeulen]

[Flavio]

Pure ROMANCE! THRILLS! EMOTION! and MONEY!

[LvKeulen]

Oh yes, if your software is not on the list, PM me. I'll gladly update this tutorial when I have the time.

*edit*
Now updated with Photoshop 7.

[Plastic Mario]

Question for Paint.net... I need to make a transparent alpha channel with an opaque body, so how would I do that? D:

[Sho Minamimoto]

Paint shop pro 7 ?

[Typhoon™]

Can I post an easier way to transparentize in GIMP?

[LvKeulen]

@Timpani: Will work on it as soon as I have time. D:

@Orangesoda: The more tutorials, the better!

[Yoshi]

W00t. I necroed a sticky.

Nice guide! I'll try that on paint right now.... actually I'm lazy right now.

[Manpersonguything]

Eeep.
I have photoshop CS 8.0
It's different by a lot.