BEGGING for help w/ transparencies

Okay....I've posted this question about 100 times now and am still not getting things to work. This has been a problem for me for over TWO YEARS!

I place a graphic into PageMaker/Word.PowerPoint/etc. on a colored background. There is a white box around the graphic. I have followed step-by-step instructions in PSE help. I have also followed instructions from the kind people on this forum. Nothing is working. This is what I've been doing:

1. Open the graphic (a logo), which has 3 layers.
2. Make sure background is saved as a regular layer.
3. Using the magic eraser, I click on the white background.
4. The checkerboard pattern appears.
5. Go to 'save as' (TIFF format) and click the box that says 'save transparency'.
6. When I place the graphic on a colored background, the white box is still there.

PLEASE tell me what I'm doing wrong! I'm on the verge of a breakdown!

Sincerely,

Erica

Tried rotating the image, even .01 inch in PM?
I've seen that as a fix mentioned many times, some sort of bug in certain PM versions?

Mac

Mac,

I've seen that work too. Unfortunately, I just tried it and no such luck.

Thanks,

Erica

First, as far as I know, TIFF file format does not support transparency and have never figured out why that shows up in the SAVE TIFF dialogue box.

Only GIF and PNG image file formats support transparency. However, your versions of PageMaker and MS Office must also support transparency! I have not used PageMaker, but note that I discovered MS Office 97 does NOT support GIF transparency (and I don't even think it supports PNG file format). I do know that Office 2000 and beyond do indeed support transparency (particularly nice in PowerPoint presentations).

Note also that GIF only supports 256 colors whereas PNG supports 'true color' (16 million colors). So check your software versions and give the other two formats a try.

Best regards,
Walt

Walt, TIFF actually does support transparency. It's my favorite format for that. From the Photoshop 7 manual, "TIFF format supports CMYK, RGB, Lab, indexed-color, and grayscale images with alpha channels and Bitmap-mode images without alpha channels. Photoshop can save layers in a TIFF file; however, if you open the file in another application, only the flattened image is visible. Photoshop can also save annotations, transparency, and multiresolution pyramid data in TIFF format."

I think, however, that if the application opening the file doesn't recognize alpha channels, which is what the transparency is saved as, then it will appear not transparent.

Whoah! Thanks Elena! I knew TIFF was the universal format. Didn't realize it had such universal application. I'll have to look into it further. Thanks!

Walt