Transparency Help Needed

[Bartimaeus]

Okay, so I'm working on a transparent image of Hobbes, (the tiger in my avatar...lol), using Photoshop/GIMP/whatever you use, and I need to know:

1. the formats that transparency works on, (.gif, .png, etc)

2. is there a way to quickly do it, without manually clicking on every pixel with the erase background tool? With this method, I get white dots all over, so that's why I need to know, XD.

3. the best format to use, as I noticed .gif sucks at quality, and often makes more dots than I originally had

The picture is attached, to show you what I mean.

[Senethior459]

Try changing the options when you save it as a .gif.
Uhh... I think GIF, PNG, and TIFF let you do transparency. Not sure if any others do, but I know JPEG/JPG and BMP, along with the rest of the common formats, will not allow transparency.

I'd say Color to Alpha and set it to 000000, but that would also erase all of the white on Hobbes. There's a black outline around him, though.
Either a color-based selection tool or a smart one will select just the white, leaving you Hobbes unselected, and you can just erase all of the white then. Fuzzy Select (I believe it's called Color Select or something in Photoshop; I'm using GIMP) will let you select all of the white, and you can erase it. Or, if you have two layers, with the bottom being transparent and the top the Hobbes image, you can just delete the selected white part, and then just merge Hobbes down onto the transparent layer.

By the way, Calvinball is the awesomest sport ever invented!

[Bartimaeus]

Well, .tiff you can't upload to forums, so I guess .png/.gif will have to be it...

I have no idea where either of those are located, lol

How do I, "delete", the white pixels? If I copy the image of Hobbes using, say, the Magic Wand tool, the white pixels come along with it.

(edit) Well, at least we agree on something around here..!

[Senethior459]

Take the original image, with white in the background, and use the Fuzzy Select on the big white patch. Zoom in and make sure it didn't get any parts of Hobbes, and then just hit Delete. It will delete everything selected, leaving you with just Hobbes.
Or, you can cut that part away.
Or, you can erase it all, without being careful, because tools only affect the selected area.