Transparent Images

[Shari]

>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.


Actually I WANT 256 colors or less.  I try to be inclusive.  Even 
though I have a thousands of colors monitor, I keep it set at 256 so 
that I can see what my images will look like, assuming there are many 
many 256 color monitors still out there.

But an image saved as a JPEG always looks good.  As a GIF, I can get 
it to look good, but it takes a lot of extra work to get it there.  A 
lot of extra options to choose and buttons to click to get the same 
quality as a JPEG.

So far my efforts with PNG failed.  I get no image at all, just a 
white rectangle.  I may try GraphicConvertor, though that is also an 
extra step, requiring me to use two programs to create the graphic, 
and a third to save it.  So we'll see...

>
>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.

Hmmmm... I've noticed weird image things when memory is low.  How 
much memory does your computer have?  And what do you have Metacard 
set to?  (I discovered setting it LOWER is better, not higher as one 
would assume.  Mine is at 10,000K and that works very well, even with 
stacks bloated with images and sounds).

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