GIF Matte Colour For Transparency

Posted by on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 4:37 pm.

In this week’s web design video blog, Nick and James talk about Google’s recent release of Google Chrome for Mac. This week’s web design tutorial focuses on Photoshop’s Save For Web ‘Matte’ feature that gives the designer control over saving GIFS with transparancy. The video concludes with an update on videos that will be released over the next couple of weeks.

In the video, it can be hard to see the ‘White Halo’ that James refers to, so we have included the following real diagram below, as illustrated in the video:


PNG Format 1.2 KB File Size	Default GIF 0.7 KB File Size	Customised Matte 0.7 KB File Size

Video Script

Hi, and welcome to this week’s web design video blog, firstly a bit of news; last week, Google released a BETA version of their Internet Browser ‘Google Chrome’ for Mac.

You can download Google Chrome in all formats at www.google.com/chrome – Google’s web page will automatically detect your operating system whether it’s Mac or PC and will have the appropriate download ready for you.

If like me, you’re a web designer, I would recommend having all popular Internet browsers available on your computer; this will help with cross platform testing of your web pages.

This week we are going to do a follow up tutorial on Photoshop’s Save For Web Feature. In a previous video, we looked at Save For Web as a whole, but today we are going to concentrate on the ‘Matte’ setting when saving GIFs.

Ideal for Logos
PNG Vs GIF – PNG Fix for IE 6.
Ideal for Print Page, textured backgrounds
What is Matte?
The defaults, and how you change the setting.
File Size Comparison.

Over the next couple of days we will be recording a series of videos that will be scheduled for publication over the Christmas holiday so please check back over the next couple of Fridays.

Our colleague Michael Angrave has also put together a little Christmas music video for us that should be uploaded to YouTube either today or early next week. We haven’t seen it yet, but i’m sure it’ll be worth a watch!

We hope this week’s video has been useful to you, if you have any questions or comments, please leave them on our YouTube Channel or directly on our supporting blog post at crearedesign.co.uk/blog

Thanks for watching.