Transparent image parts are quite common in design. The purpose of having a transparent part is that this way it is possible to display the underlying color or image. Most often the background is the transparent part of an image, though in many cases there are other parts, which are partially or totally transparent.
The main reason for making the background transparent is that this is very convenient for use on the Web – you make the image and then you place it on the background of the site. When you change the background of the site, there is no need to change the background of the image as well. It might not look like a big deal but with a moderately large Website that has 100 pages with 5-10 images each, it makes a difference when you have to manually change the background of each of these images.
Creating a transparent image part is not difficult, provided that you have the right software. A good program for making backgrounds transparent is ImageConverterPlus. The program does much more than adding transparent parts to your image. For instance, it can help you convert your image from one format to another. If your images are in JPEG format or in any other format that does not support transparency, the first thing you need to do is a conversion to format which supports transparency – for instance GIF.
After you have converted your files to GIF, the next step is to select the parts of the image that need to become transparent. If these parts are in only one color, then it is easy – select the color and then choose to replace it with transparency. If the parts you want to make transparent consist of many colors, then you need to repeat the same step for each of the colors. This might look like a lot of work but actually it isn’t because ImageConverterPlus supports profiles, which allow to automate the process.
The profile functionality is even more convenient when you have many files to process. For instance, if you need to make the background of all of them transparent and their current background color is the same, you can process them at once, which is very handy.
Author: Ada Ivanova