I need help. transparency

I have been using photoshop for years. I have constantly run into this problem and hope someone can give me an answer.

I know how to save transparent gifs and pngs on a solid background but is there a way to save a gif that will not look like crap on a textured background?

For example here is a page :

http://www.spambite.com/tripwater/main/listen.html

Notice the "Sounds" image. I have saved it as a compuserv gif, a gif 89a and tried save for web as well as a transparent png and what you see on this page is the best I could get. You see the water background image I am trying to place this over but the dithering is unacceptable.

I tried to upload the psd file for you to see but it took forever and (only 40k) so I gave up after 6 tries.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions. I have tried many things but can not get a good looking image over a texture.

Thanks

i had the same problem and it took many hours to get the fricken things to work, but there is a very simple fast way of fixing them ( i have only tried for GIFS).

When you have the headphones open in photoshop with the transparent background, select the magic wand tool. Click the transparent background and hit delete. I found i eventually end up around 25-30 tolerence, although i always start at around 3...

Anyway worked for me, hope it helps.

Thank you, I will give it a try and let you know.

Rock on! That made a huge difference! Do you have any suggestions as to what I can do to lessen the cut off of the actual image? If I can get it to look a little more like it does in PS I will be pumped.

www.spambite.com/tripwater/main/listen.html

I am very pleased, just being picky now. I want to try and keep the few pixels in the headphones that were removed when I did the wand technique.

I will play with the tolerance. Thanks

One more thing, if you go to that same page, I also have this problem when I save a transparent image, my text layer gets chewed up. Notice the Sounds font. It is jagged and parts of it is missing. Any ideas?

Thanks again.

Oh I finally got my file to upload, so you can check it out

Sorry i dont have many fonts (dunno what happened) but when i save it in the few i tried it works fine.

As for it selecting th eactual image all i do is grab the lasso tool and press alt and deselect. Sorry i dont get much more complicated than that...lol.

What you could do is make your img (or text) on a background with the same color as your textured background (just use the eyedropper on a part that is "representative" for the color).
Then select your text (or image), just ctrl-klick on the layer w/ the image. Then choose select>modify>expand and expand the selection a couple of pixels. Then choose select>feather. You have to play around with the values of these to make it look good.
Then just invert the selection and delete the background.

His background is a picture, and what if you want to change it? I think the idea was so that it can be changed without doing more graphic editing.

The way I understood it is that he will use his graphics (headphones and text) on one background - the water. Where does he mention that he will want to use them against different textured backgrounds?