The Advantage of Transparent GIFs
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A Plain Ol' GIF
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A Transparent GIF
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Transparent GIFS
Many people have their browsers set to display a solid background of white or some other color other than the default gray that is the default Web page background. Few Web sites use the old fashioned grey backgrounds anymore. Gifs with colored backgrounds can look a bit weird floating over a page with a different colored background. This means transparent GIFs will usually look better than plain ol' GIFs.
Transparent GIFs let the color of the background they are displayed on show through the parts of the graphic you have selected to be the "transparent" part. In the process of converting a GIF to transparent, one color in the GIF can be selected as the one to be replaced and become transparent. If your graphic was originally created with a white background, white would probably be the best color to set as the transparent color. Remember though, everything in the graphic that is white will become transparent. If a graphic on a white background of a face with white eyes is converted to a transparent GIF with white being the transparent color, the eyes, and anything else in the graphic that is white, will be transparent also. The color of the browsers' background will show through the eyes. For this reason it might be wise to make the eyes blue in this particular instance.
Nowadays most graphics creation and manipulation programs let you make your gifs transpasrent and/or interlaced with just the click of a button. Here are a few tools that can help out.
If you're a die-hard MS-DOS user and want a command line to work from, giftrans converts GIF 87a to GIF 89a formats (a necesary first step) and makes them transparent. Once you figure out how to use it, it's easy but be prepared for some head banging until you get the hang of it.
Another possibility is Image Alchemy, which converts over 75 image formats. Image Alchemy is available for DOS, OS/2, SCO UNIX, and Mac.
If you want a no-brainer, we strongly recommend LviewPro. It's a Windows program and lets you convert GIFs to transparent and make them interlaced all in one pass. It can do lots of other useful graphics stuff too and it is extremely easy to use. You simply open a GIF file and then save it. You're done. You can skip the interlacing if you like or skip the transparency part. You can open multiple files at once.
Flush Your Cache, Hit Your Reload Button and See Which GIF Seems to Load Faster
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An Interlaced GIF
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A Regular, Non-interlaced GIF
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Interlaced GIFs
Interlaced GIFs (and JPEGs) are graphics that seem to load in pieces or stages as if a venetian blind is being opened and closed in front of the graphic as it loads. Medium sized to large GIFs seem to load faster if they are interlaced. My experiments indicate there is little, if any, actual difference in loading times but interlaced GIFs seemto load faster. For one thing, surfers can get an idea of what the graphic will look like before it is done loading and can make up their minds more quickly whether to hang around to see it in all its loaded glory or surf on. For this reason, I almost always save my GIFs as interlaced. The program I use for manipulating graphics for my Web pages, LViewPro, allows you to simply leave the selection "Save As Interlaced" checked so everything you do is automatically converted to interlaced without having to think about it.
After creating this page and playing around with it, it seems to me that the non-interlaced GIF above completes loading faster but the interlaced one is recognizable much sooner.
Remember - most of this stuff is shareware - download it, try it out, and register it.
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