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Icons - Creating a tranparent background??????


L

Lee

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Okay, I have worked on this for longer than I care to admit and it's making me more than just a little crazy (more than normal, that is). It seems so easy to solve and I can't.

Here's the deal. I have a bunch of icons made for PC's that I'd like to use on the Mac. When I download the icons and unzip the file most come with two icons. An ico and a png image. Originally I could not get either to open in Photoshop so I got this little freeware prgm. (Icon Grabber) that converts icons to tiff files. Now I can drag it into PS and work on it. When I open it it shows up as having a transparent background. All is well. I then save it as a png so it will work on the Mac. All is well again and I can use the icon BUT it's showing up on the Mac as having a white background even though in PS it showed up ?as a transparent background. I have tried saving it to SuperPNG which supports and saves transparencies but still now luck.

What am I doing wrong? Why does the image show up as transparent in PS but not when I use it? The icon works fine on the Mac it just has the unwanted white background. How in the devil to I convert this baby so that is shows up as transparent?

As always, your help is much appreciated.

Lee
 
You might of already tried this but check if you have a white background as one of your layers and it is unchecked in PS... if thats not it I have another program that you can download its called "Icon developer". you can get it at Stardock.com. I can help you in getting icons to you open so you can edit it in PS if you get it. It is a great program to edit and create icons. ;)

I will try to think of something else that would make a white background
 
Thanks, Red. I only have two layers in PS. The background layer and the duplicate layer above. I have, as you suggested, unchecked the background layer but no luck. Thanks for the idea anyway. I will check Stardock. I used to use them for awhile when I had my PC. Aren't they just PC and therefore any program on their site be PC? I will take a look at Icon Developer and see if it's Mac compatible.

Anyone else have any suggestions?
 
It's not Mac compatible. They're just PC.
I'm not sure what your doing wrong....maybe try deleting the BG or merging with the top layer?
 
Lee, try opening the .PNG on your Mac in PS. Edit it if needed, (remove any background, but there really shouldn't be one) and resaving it as a .png on the Mac. I can't even imagine why there is a problem but this may correct it. RM
 
Thanks, Ron. Unfortunately, that is exactly what I was doing even tho there was no background to edit (it was already transparent) but nada. Still a white background when I used the icon on the Mac.

I found something interesting in my experiments. When i exported a png file from a zip folder that contained both ico and png I could NOT use the png as is. I could open it in PS but not use it on the Mac as an icon. I accidently found that if I opened it in PS and did anything to the image (I just sharpened it) and then saved it it would only THEN be useable as an icon on the computer. The key was saving the png image just slightly altered from the original. Go figure, huh? I mean, most of my icons on the Mac are png's. So why did I have to alter the one from the zip file to get it to work???

Anyway, it's not so much now that I want the icons. This has gotten to be a personal crusade for me. Why is something that should be so easy so hard??? Come hell or high water I'm gonna get to the bottom of this just because.......

All ideas still welcome.

Film at 11 }P
 
well Lee, I just created a .png image on my pc in PS. saved it to file, cranked up the Mac (OSX tiger)
PSCS2 and opened the file, it displayed the image with the transp. BG. Re-saved it as a .png to the desktop, and lo and behold, it had a white box around it. I can't imagine why. Please let us know what you discover and I'll do the same.

Ed; I just opened it (the Mac version) on my PC and it's transparent again????????????????
 
Whew, I started reading your post, Ron, and I thought you were going to say that just converting to a png works fine for you. I think I would have gone out and played in traffic if that'd happened. I played with it more last night looking for the illusive solution but nada. Thank goodness my man, Welles, turned me onto this wonderful little application that does that for me. It's a PS plugin. Just open your icon and go to File> Export> Export Icon (the new plugin) and voila, you have a Mac icon with a transparent background.

I still would like to find out why we can't do it manually, though. Makes me nuts when I can't solve what should be an easy problem.
 
But it shouldn't require a plugin. There's something going on here that simply isn't kosher. A .png with a transp. bg is just that regardless of what platform. Tonight I'll try Save for web, png-24 and png 8 and see what happens. Could it be a transparency issue within the image itself that isn't being preserved?
 
I belive that the problem resides in the difference between both Photoshop versions.

The other "odd" may be the difference of image display between Windows and OSX.

The best advice i can give you is to expose the problem to the Adobe Staff.



Good luck, i hope that you find some solutions! :)
 
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