Making the background of a png (or jpg.. if possible) transparent?

Question

I need a good tutorial on how to make backgrounds transperant, I have Fireworks 8 and ms paint installed. I have searched the web and all the tutorials I find are just confusing.. anyone have any good ones or know how to do it?

Answer 1

PNG (portable networks graphics) can store transparency information, but unfortuantly JPG cannot. Currently, to my knowadge, only PNGs, GIFs (grafical interchange format), TIFFs (Tagged Image File Format), and possibly 32-bit BMP (bitmap). i recommend irnfanview (which is free!) to export transparency.
but, in JPG's, the only way to have transparency is to have the main image, then to make another image with the same dimensions, and on a paint program, draw black everywhere you want to hide, and use white on everything you want to show.

see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_%28graphic%29
and: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_channel

Answer 2

You just need to use fireworks 8 and just make your picture, get rid of the background and save it as a .gif

that will work .