I started with a white background, and selected an image from the Fire picture tube. I then made the white background transparent, which is the second image. Note the white "halo" left by the transparency. These pixels were not precisely pure white because of the shading of the image. I then changed the background color to match the background used on this page (HEX=ccffcc, RGB=204,255,204). I then made that background transparent, and that is image number 3. Now the white halo is gone, and the result is much more satisfactory.
I am once again putting my oldest girl on the center stage. I began with a JPEG image from Lesson 2.I then used the Lasso to do a rough select of just Shannon and get rid of most of the background. To do this, I opened the image with a background color that matched the background of this page. Then I zoomed in to a 4:1 image, and used the eraser tool set to 4 to erase the remaining background. This gave me the third image. The background is now completely gone, but the edge of the image is very jagged, and doesn't look all good. So I used the Retouch tool, set to soften, and size 4, and went around the edges of the image. That gave me the final product, which I rather like.
I created this using Fireworks to create the individual frames. The reason is that I was using text exclusively for the animation, and I have found Fireworks to be much easier when working with text. I then assembled 21 images in Animation Shop, with the lowest file size setting because I had a monocolor type on a transparent background. The frames were set for 10.
I decided to make my girl a star for this one.
Some people may not know that there are AVI files on your hardrive right now if you use Windows. Many of the animated graphical animated elements are done as AVI files, so all you have to do is use the Find feature and look for *.avi. I did this, and found one you have all seen before. Here it is as an animated GIF that was 21K as an AVI file, but only 7K as an animated GIF. Of course, it was the type of image that is optimal for a GIF since it has only a few colors in large areas.
