gif transparency problem - no transparency on win xp style

[jennico]

hi there !

nearly at the point of crying. i made two gifs with a perfect transparency. but when you change the display settings from Classic Windows Style to Win XP Style, the one loses its transparency, while the other one does not.

i cannot explain myself this problem. the two gifs are nearly identical. please help me someone. what do i do wrong with the bigger gif ? i want it to stay transparent, just like the smaller one.

PLEASE HELP !

here is my example and please also download the zipped gifs.

guicreate("My Transparency Enigma")

GUISetBkColor(0xff0000)

GUICtrlCreateLabel("",30,30,100,100)
GUICtrlSetBkColor(-1,0xfff000)

GUICtrlCreatePic("big die.gif",10,10,64,64)

GUICtrlCreatePic("small die.gif",114,15,32,32)

GUISetState()

MsgBox(0,"My Transparency Enigma","Please Switch your display settings between"&@LF& _
        "Windows Classic Style and XP Style."&@LF&@LF& _
        "In XP Style the bigger die loses its transparency."&@LF&@LF& _
        "But why ?"&@LF&@LF&"In both dice the same transparency color "&@LF& _
        "is set to '204,204,204' (0xCCCCCC) "&@LF& _
        "for the round edges and the eyes."&@LF&@LF& _
        "The left upper Pixel is '204,204,204', too."&@LF&@LF& _
        "Please help me !")

Do
    $msg=GUIGetMsg()
Until $msg=-3

thank you all

j.

Edited May 18, 2008 by jennico

[jennico]

bump !

i wonder why, even

DllCall("uxtheme.dll", "none", "SetThemeAppProperties", "int", 0)

doesn't help !

PLEASE HELP !

[jennico]

bump !

personally i don't use the xp themes but somehow there must be a help for the poor people who cannot live without blue borders around their windows.

please help me to fix this annoyance.

j.

[smashly]

Hi

The color palette for the images are different.

Small image has 4 unique colors, the Big has 15 unique colors.

I gather you resized the smaller image and more unique colors of gray have been added by dithering or resize filters (just a guess).

I tried a fast and dirty resize of the small to large and chose the outer gray edge as the transparent color and it works ok for me with XP Default style.

Cheers

[jennico]

yes, i noticed before that the transparency stays when you just change the size like that:

GUICtrlCreatePic("small die.gif",10,10,64,64)

i will try to reduce the colors of the big one, maybe it helps. but anyway they are only 256 colors bitmaps. i would like to understand the basic problem on that, but i don't find anything.

thank you smashly

j.

[jennico]

okay, i reduced the colors to 4 and it works. !!!!!

the 15 colors were added when i used anti-aliasing for the round edges. Very weird issue.

now i will try to add more colors until it loses transparency again. have to find a compromise between quality and transparency.

thx again

j.

Edited May 19, 2008 by jennico

[qwert]

have to find a compromise between quality and transparency.

Just want to mention that you can use a 24-bit BMP instead of a GIF. I had problems trying to convert your bigdie.gif into something with transparency. MSPaint wouldn't produce a usable BMP from it, but a BMP I created from scratch worked on the first try.

[jennico]

hi qwert

thank you i thought about that, too. i made a set of bmp and experimented a lot with them. as far as i understand, a bmp requires a gui without background ($WS_EX_LAYERED style) in order to appear transparent, while a transparent gif works on any background color and label. so, if i want to use the picture in something like a tab control, a .gif is more convenient.

j.

[jennico]

after working one night on pixels and palettes i ended up with a very satisfying result. i needed the help of a palette program (colorcache4, very good shareware !).

i found out that it is rather the kind of palette u use than the amount of colors. still i cannot say what is the basic problem, sometimes a 20 color palette worked, sometimes 4 colors did not, depending on the colors. it is an annoying work of trying out, it seems.

my final result has a good quality and consists of 7 gray scale colors out of a 256 color palette and of course transparency in all xp themes. thank you so much smashly for bringing me on the right way. this was hard work !

j.

Edited May 20, 2008 by jennico