assistance with transparent background

heya all,

i've done a search on the forums and google and altho i've tried many of the tutorials i can't seem to get the effect that i want.

i am trying to make a 'square' that will tile, it has one color (something close to cccc99, but i've just been clicking any brown for now, trying to get this to work).

thats the entire image.

i want this to be transparent - the end goal is to have a transparent background image that will go over a normal image on my site.

you can see this (without the transparency, and very messed up) on my test site at:

http://www.lisa-jill.com/categories/test/ - in the right column choose 'transparent'

with photoshop, i set the opacity to 80% and then saved it - i had the transparency box ticked and it looked like it saved ok, but then when i view it with anything else, its 100% opaque.. i'm not sure where I'm going wrong but I'm terrible with photoshop so i'm not surprised.

if someone can either tell me how to do this or point me to a tutorial for this specifically, i'd be greatly appreciative

i was doing this using moz-filter-opaciy and alpha-filter in css but that wasn't cross browser compatable, only ie happy, so i'd rather use a graphic.

thanks for any help =)

With gif images, it is either completely transparent, or a solid color. As far a gif's are concerned, there is no such thing as "transparent opacity."

Now, PNG's will do the affect you are looking for. Just save it as a png, not a gif.

there's a png up there currently - it was definitely transparent in ps but now its not.... as you can probably see =)

what i did was to create the image - a rectangle with the color you see, the image was transparent and 3x2 - i chose 80% opacity

then i did a save for web - i chose png 24 and clicked 'transparent' - it still looked right in ps - now on my page and viewed using picture viewer - it isnt' transparent

i'm obviously doing something wrong, i just don't know what

Not all browsers will support png tranz.

Take the test here:

http://entropymine.com/jason/testbed/pngtrans/

and jpegs can't either be semi transparent?

so i can either continue this non-cross browser compatabilty or give it up til css3 is more widely supported?

sigh, oh well I'll give that theory up then =)

thanks everyone!

Wait! I found a way to make it work in IE:

http://www.alistapart.com/stories/pngopacity/

still the same problem tho; especially since i use mozilla and woulod like to see it the wa most people do =)

thanks for the help / researh i do appreciate it!

Sure thing. I use Mozilla also. I wish everyone used Mozilla.

amen *grins*