transparent sprites

A lot of people have sprites with transparent backgrounds, and a lot of people want to know how to do it. It's actually really easy, if you have GIMP. The first step is to, of course, make the sprite. Then, you copy and paste it into a new GIMP document (doesn't matter what size, just bigger than the sprite). Crop down the image so that there is a one pixel edge of white space around the sprite; makes it easier that way. You should have something like this (with a different sprite, of course)


Now comes the "hard" part. In the window with the image, go to "Layers > Transparency > Add Alpha Channel." Like this:


Now all you have to do is use the magic wand tool (be sure that feathered edges are off and threshold is zero.) And select all of the white space, dragging it off the picture. Once you have dragged a white part away, click anywhere in the window (where there's an anchor beside the pointer) to delete it. You should see a gray check pattern in the background, that means it's transparent.

To save it so that the transparency shows on all computers and browsers, simply type ".gif" at the end of the name you give it instead of ".png". GIMP doesn't mess sprites up when you save them as GIFs, so don't worry about it. ;]



And viola, that's how you make transparent sprites!