transparent .bmp's

[ottoman]

I have been trying to find how to make a bmp with a transparent background, but have not been able to find out how. I know that bmp's don't natively have support for transparency like png's and gif's do, but there has to be a way to do it because the guide on how to put an oem logo on the My Computer screen says you can.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Wraith]

Try #FF00FF, or #0000FF.

Those are generally the transparent colours for bitmaps that I've seen in windows.

If not, http://www.googleisyourfriend.com/

[ToBe]

Found this using google, gonna try it to see if it works:

To make a transparent bitmap you must make sure that the bitmap has been converted to Indexed 256 colour. 24bit Bitmaps will not make a transparent image. Make sure that pixel (0,0) in the top left most part of the picture has the colour you want to be transparent.

If you have a background colour that you do not want to be transparent put another colour at pixel (0,0), preferably 1 that doesn't appear in the rest of the image. Some image editors allow you to add a colour to the palette if needed.

In some cases setting colour 0 in the colour index also can help.

And here is the webpage quoted, with a freeware tool

EDIT// works like a charm

Edited July 20, 2004 by ToBe