Transparent Images

[Yates, Glen]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Shari [mailto:gypsyware at earthlink.net]
> 
> It only works if I save it as a GIF image.  Unfortunately, that's a 
> LOT of extra work for me, as GIFs want to degrade the image and I 
> have to ditz and ditz to get it to look the same.  There's no easy 
> save option for GIFS in my software that doesn't degrade the image. 
> I'm in the middle of doing this right now, with a very large batch of 
> images.  My PhotoDeluxe program is not Applescriptable, so they each 
> have to be done the hard way, using the Advanced Save option.

One word, GraphicConverter, or is that 2? :-) If you're are on a Mac and
need to convert images from any format to any other format, then you need
this excellent piece of shareware.

As far as transparency, of the formats Metacard supports, only GIF and PNG
support transparency. And as you have noticed GIF suffers degradation
because the colors are reduced to 256. PNG does not have this problem, and
also supports an alpha channel to give you partial transparency if you want.

My problem, however, is that I can import a transparent image, and it might
look fine when I import it, but when I run my stack it might not show up as
transparent, but a lot of times it does. And whats really weird is that I
can leave a card with a transparent image on it (thats not showing up right)
and come back to it in the course of running my program, and it'll look OK
and vice versa.

In my troubleshooting, I've played around with buffering, both the image
itself and the background, and it has no effect. I've also tried changing
the ink from the default srcCopy to transparent, again no effect. To make
matters worse, it happens seemingly randomly about 1/4 to 1/8 of the time.
Also, this happens on both windows (2000 & 98) and mac (X and 9). So, it
can't be just a video driver thing.

-Glen Yates