As you can see, I've got myself a Gravatar. I've seen that Artefact has managed to make his avatar background transparent.
However, if I try uploading a png with transparent background all I get is black and opaque! Coloring it white obviously doesn't help, but at least it looks better than black on this site.
Please share your wisdom, Artefact!
Try saving it with different options - I'm not sure which options are doing it (obviously I made it last year when the site started, so I don't recall the details), but it's probably something like the number of bits or what have you. It was a png exported from Inkscape if I recall correctly.
My first try was with Inkscape. I've exported once more with Inkscape, and it seems to work now! We'll see when the Gravatar cache is updated.
By the way, the grey triangle default avatar seems to have a white and opaque background too. Is this intended?
Your gravatar still seems to have solid background color to me.
I did discover a new feature in the gimp thanks to you though. (new to me that is)
Gimp > Colors > Colors to Alpha. If it's doing what I think it's doing (calculating how 'transparent' anti aliased pixels should be based on the background color) what I think it's doing.. then it's gonna come in REAL handy.
This what I ended up with, so you might want to try this version (since yours still looks non-transparent to me).
Well, I tried saving a PNG with a transparent background in both GIMP and Inkscape. Didn't work. Even when uploading a SVG, Gravatar completely ignored the alpha channel!
Though it's nice to know they accept SVG.
Well worst case you make it blocky and save it as paletted 256 color png (or gif).
Or settle for a solid background fill I guess.
Rather mysterious... Only other tool I might have used would have been Irfanview.
Well I think I know what the problem is. Maybe the image is not fully transparent, as there is some artefact (no pun intended) left on the image that you haven't realized. Its just basically some tiny pixels left on the image when you transparent the image. I had this problem as well when I was on another forum, so I think it might be related.
You could just try and erase the transparent background, upload it and see what happens....
Though artefacts does have a white'ish outer edge they're still semi-transparent.
So no idea what kind of voodoo he unknowningly seems to have used.
Usually the gimp does those kind of things pretty good, at least when I used paint shop pro I alway had this problem of colors in png in internet explorer being slightly off (were fine in Firefox) compared to jpg's/gif.
Saving them in gimp solved that problem.
it will probably always be strange format, other weirdness is that grey scale and palleted images in some cases (especially gradients) can take up more space then a full color one.
I fixed the artefacts (or lack thereof) in your picture.
Hope you like my chop job.
Edit: Yes! It looks even worse when I post it!
That's what you get for two minutes in Paint.
There shouldn't be any artifacts other than ones due to compression. But with png you shouldn't get artifacts on an image with at most 4 different colors, should you?
I have sent an email to their support and got a reply today requesting the files I used. I'll upload them here as well for your review:
Ok, one isn't transparent at all, but you get the point.
Btw, Artefact: How about adding svg support? :)
.svg support - I think not.
Did you ask them why mine came out transparent?
I didn't, but I can mention yours if their answer to my reply is unsatisfying.
Why no .svg support?
Prolly because of poor browser support?
No wait, let me rephrase that. Internet Explorer is the ONLY browser that does not support it. Even worse, internet explorer 8 wont support it either.
Support in other browsers is mediocre at best, but at least they all support foreground images. Opera has the best support for it afaik allowing them to be used as background images as well.. which is very sexy for fluid designs.
Oh well, don't expect them to be used for anything web related the next 8 years or so.. just like that alpha transparent png that needs looking into even nowadays ;)
You can thank IE6 for that as they haven't been used on the web untill IE7 with proper support gained a big enough user amount for some sites to say "Screw you and your outdated browser, go update or watch crappy images"
The format itself is none too convincing. My .svgs only display properly in Inkscape, in Irfanview and Illustrator they come out very badly.
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