I find that many people opt for full transparency when applying images/graphics to their forums. This is fine, if that image hasn't got any curved areas or transparent areas. However, Opting for full transparency when dealing with curved images results in that image having a jaggy border showing around it which gives that image a rough tacky and sometime redundant colour around the edges. if you've not used the correct matte colour to compliment the background colour to which the image is being applied onto basically it's going to look shit.
I find that using the matte dropdown menu in photoshop and picking the appropriate colour background that the graphic is being applied onto eliminates the rough graphic which has become more commonplace. Using this method, will result in smoother more higher quality displayed images without that redundant edge looking so nasty.
Lets Begin!!
You have your image/graphic completed, and you are ready to save and apply that image to your forum and/or website.
1. In Photoshop. Click File scroll down to Save For Web, Select and click.
2. Now that you are in the Save For Web menu. Follow the instructions showed in the screenshot. Bare in mind, that the color you choose for instruction no 2 is the colour of the background that the image is being applied onto (the background colour it's being applied upon). Step 1 is your format selector which would only apply if you choose .gif. (Screenshot Below)
An example in using .gif and saving it to a matte colour, rather than saving it as transparent, you'll see the visual difference in quality. Correctly colour matted .gifs will look visually superior than transparent .gifs which results in jagged edges (around curved edges) and parts of the images being cropped.
Finished. You should now have a smoother, visually improved looking image applied onto your forum or website. Bare in mind, this applies to .gifs where .gif would be the preferred format over .png due to the icon containing animations which .png doesn't support though .png does a better job with transparency and I would recommend using .png for static images.
I always personally just never had transparency, I just filled the background of the image with whatever color the background would be that it'd be on. But I guess this would be so much better for backgrounds with multiple colors and such.
Yeah this is what I do, but what sucks is that we have the ability for users to customize their profiles and it looks really bad when someone has picked dark backgrounds etc and the images have white matte. But I just have to deal with it And wait for the day when I can use PNG without it looking bad for some people
Yeah this is what I do, but what sucks is that we have the ability for users to customize their profiles and it looks really bad when someone has picked dark backgrounds etc and the images have white matte. But I just have to deal with it And wait for the day when I can use PNG without it looking bad for some people
You can always use the replacement variable manager and do what I do and have the .gifs parse to .png format which has worked well for me. Almost all .gifs in vb3 are replaced with pngs without the need for template editing. I'm surprised people don't use this much though we don't have to worry about the format in vb4.
09-14-2009, 10:00 PM
09-15-2009, 08:04 PM
And wait for the day when I can use PNG without it looking bad for some people
