How do you get the background of pictures transparent?

[Dunn's]

Hi everyone we are having trouble trying to design on new navigation bar for our website. We are wanting to take the leaf that is used as a comma and use it as the leaf for our navbar button. The problem we are having is MS paint keeps adding a white background to the leaf even when we are cutting it out of our GIF file of our logo which has a transparent background.

Any help you could give on the matter is greatly appreciated, or if you know of the software that can help us. We have MSpaint,adobe photo shop starter addition and the Print Shop 21, als we have Sign Blazer elements but do not think that software will help.

Thank you for your time!!

[Toni Anicic]

You can't create a transparent background gif in ms paint LoL

Try using the adobe photo shop as you said you posses it.

[cascade21]

Use Adobe Photoshop with the background set to transparent to create your .gif file. MS Paint is very limited in some of their features. I am not familiar with the starter edition of Photoshop, but if transparent .gif files aren't an option, check out downloading a free 30 day trial of the new Photoshop to make your file. Just ensure you make all your changes, cause you cant download it again without buying! : ) Adobe - Creative Suite 3 trials
Good Luck!

[maemae]

Hello
Microsoft Paint can be a very usefull program with the right projects. It does not have the ability to create transparent gifs though (would be a nice feature though) I suggest trying the above or look up the free program called giffy to make your gif format graphics have transparent backgrounds.
Maemae

[nottheusual1]

You need a program that can work on Web images. It will let you define a transparent color when outputing the image to GIF.

Try GIMP - small learning curve, but it does good with Web graphics:

GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program

They have versions available for WinDoze - just look around a bit or google "gimp".

Good stuff and free

[Dunn's]

Thanks everyone for all the help so far.

[uberanimal]

photoshop is the way to go. Use a background eraser tool in photoshop and then save it as a GIF and set as transparent. OR.. you do the same and save it as a PNG file and set it as transparent. PNG image files work well on the sites for being transparent.