N>Immediate help with signature transparency.

[trljason]

Sorry in advance if thise post doesn't belong on this forum. And if it does, but happens to be in the wrong topic, I'm sorry for that aswell. I googled something like, "signature forum help" and this forum was one of the results, so I figured it would be worth a shot. Anyways, heres my problem.

I have been a signature/avatar designer for some time now and I also do a lot of graphic art/design and some 3d modeling. But not ONCE have I ever stumped upon the need for transparencies. My issue right now is I have created a signature for a friend and I have elements that stick "outside" of the signature. As I have never designed my signatures like this before, I am unsure of how to make it transparent. I tried googling god knows how many guides and such and nothing seems to explain it.

For those of you that don't understand what I am asking, here are examples:

This was the previous signature that my friend was using which she had someone else make for her. As you can see, the person in the signature is sticking outside of the actualy >signatures< boundaries. And the image itself is actualy as big as the null space that the character resides in. However on a forum, the null space is transparent and looks like the following.



But when you save the image and say, open it up in paint, some of that null space which was transparent, appears black like this:



And if saved as a BMP from the URL, looks like this:



Now here is the signature I created for her.



As you can see, the snow flake sticks out of the signatures actual boundaries. And because of that, my INTENTIONS are to have all that black space above and below the signature transparent. Example:



Here are 2 examples of signatures I've made that didn't involve any elements sticking outside of the signature, thus avoiding the need for any transparencies.





I like to think I have some talent/creativity as far as the general creation of a design goes...but like I said, have never having the need for transparencies, I've never looked in to how use them.

I just can't seem to figure out how to do it. At first, when I saw that after saving the original sig and opening it with ms paint that the null space was black, I figured: "oh! black must come out as transparent when saved as a PNG". Stupid assumption though considering there are black spots within the actual signature itself. So that idea went down the drain. Then I tried some "transparency mask" thing with a program called xnview and that didn't help as well as various websites that supposedly "generated" transparent pngs for you but those also didn't work.

As I've said, I've tried and tried looking for solutions. It's been hours since I first started and it's just becoming a pain in the ass now.

It would be nice if someone could take the image and create a transparent version of it for me aswell as actualy explaing to me how to do it if its not that difficult of a proccess. If it is difficult and lengthy to explain then don't worry about it. But I'd certainly appreciate it if someone could make a transparent version of it for me.

Thanks it advance to anyone who can help me.

- Jason

[cashcannon]

I dont know what paint does exactly, but it's a very basic program.
If you use photoshop/fireworks etc, you can delete all the black, and save it as a .png file, and you're done.



I'm not sure, but IE6 etc don't support png without some fancy code added

[chicgeek]

Moved fro webdesign.

Good luck.

[Bina]

Something else you can do, using Fireworks, is fill the black with white and then
choose "Index Transparency" in the Optimize "Window". Then just export it
as a gif or png file.

- Bina.

[tresmom]

What program are you using? I don't think you can save it as transparent in Paint.