How to Change Transparent Colors in Adobe Photoshop 7

Changing the transparent colors in an image is useful for making it mesh well with a website background or layering multiple images on top of each other, but figuring out how to change the transparency can be frustrating as the documentation included with Photoshop isn't always clear. These steps will show the easiest and quickest way to change which colors are set to transparent.

Things You'll Need

• Adobe Photoshop 7
• GIF image

Instructions

1. Run the Adobe Photoshop 7 program normally by double clicking on the desktop icon or locating the Photoshop entry in the "Programs" section of your start bar. Open the image that you want add or change transparent colors with by clicking on "File" and then "Open" in the main tool bar and then browsing for the image.

2. Click on "Image" in the main tool bar at the top of the screen and then click on "Mode." This will bring up a new drop down menu with several different options to choose from.

3. Choose the option labeled "Color Table" in the new drop down menu, which will bring up an entirely new window. The new window will have a break down of every single color used in the GIF image and show them all singly in a table. Each hue in the image will be broken into its component shades, so you may need to change or remove some colors to make the transparency more noticeable.

4. Locate the eye dropper icon in the lower right hand corner of the new window and click on it. This will change the function of your cursor so that it will now change a color to transparent instead of just selecting the color when you click it.

5. Find the color in the color table that you want to be transparent in your image. Click on that color to change it to the transparent color. As long as the check box marked "Preview" is checked, your image will preview the change so you can decide if you want to keep the transparency. To save the change click on "OK," otherwise hit "Cancel." If you add any more of the transparent color to the image those sections will also be transparent.

Tips & Warnings

• Transparent colors can only be changed in GIF images. If your image is a JPEG or other format, click on "file" and then "save as" and choose to save the image in GIF format.

• The color table can also be used to remove individual colors completely from the image. With the color table open, hold down the "CTRL" key on your keyboard and then click on a color. This will delete the color entirely from anywhere it used to be located in the image.