Need help making an icon pretty

Forum: X and Fluxbox
Topic: Need help making an icon pretty
started by: u2musicmike

Posted by u2musicmike on June 01 2006,16:07

I made an icon using xpaint and resized it with imagemagick to use for my isp dial up script. The problem is that my icon has an ugly white background and I was wondering if anyone knew a way to make the icon background transparent.

Thanks,
Mike

Posted by mikshaw on June 01 2006,22:16

If it were me I'd use Gimp, even though I'm sure imagemagick has the ability to remove background color. I just prefer seeing what i'm doing when editing images rather than relying on some mathemagical function.

Anywho...in Gimp....

Duplicate the background to get a layer with useable transparency.
Delete the background layer.
Select the white around the image and cut it.
Touch up with an eraser if necessary.
Save as png or gif.

Posted by u2musicmike on June 05 2006,19:11

Thanks mikshaw, I should have looked at the imagemagick web page a little bit more before I posted my question. I found transparent is a command line option for convert so I just did convert -transparent white phone2.png phone3.png and no more background.

I haven't used gimp yet but I have heard it's like photoshop and I think that I might need a PC with more ram and MHz to use it. I know xpaint is pretty limited but I haven't been making too many icons.