The same graphic in IE7 (Vista) renders first with a black fringe before the htc behavior kicks in and fixes everything. While it does fix things, it’s ugly as sin when you are using something like jquery to fade things in and out (jquery’s fadeIn, fadeOut effects)

It seems to happen even if I make the png graphic in Fireworks, although that may also be a factor of the “improvements” to both Photoshop and Fireworks from our friends at Adobe in CS4. I just recently installed the Master Collection CS4 on my (ew) Vista desktop and have started using it there.

Fireworks has always let you set the background or matte of a 32bit png export but adjusting that doesn’t seem to (now) have any effect.

I’m eager to find this answer, too.

pngout – http://www.ardfry.com/png-plugin/index.html
web image guru – http://www.vimas.com/ve_guru.htm

Sadly, both cost $

http://plasticbugs.com/?p=241

If you mean the looks of the X11, then if you have a Mac, Apple’s X11 isn’t too bad looking.

So far, I”ve been using 8-bit paletted PNGs with one fully transparent colour (like GIF, but then a smaller and better format) (in Fireworks: export to 8-bit PNG with exact colours and alpha), which works nicely as well.

~Grauw

A suggested workaround is to use ImageMagicK to set the tRNS chunk, after making the bullet in GIMP. However, you shouldn’t even be taking advantage of this bug in MSIE’s implementation of the PNG format — just use regular transparency (which is possible in GIMP).

I haven’t tried these Photoshop directions (http://www.axialis.com/tutorials/tutorial-misc001.html), but I have used the analogous Corel/JASC PaintShopPro instructions, and they work great for creating alpha-blended images. As you’ve discovered, this can be quite tricky, especially since almost every application I’ve tried has significant quirks in the way it handles alpha transparency, including frequent inconsistencies even within a single program. Generally, alpha support is only partial, regardless of what you might otherwise think.

Give it a try and let me know how it works…

I think it’s best to split your problem into two parts – what PS is doing PNG wise and viewing it on the web. I recently solved the PS png/alpha problem.

Do a Save As Web. Select PNG over on the right, pick a reasonable number of colors. On the bottom right select the palette entries (one at a time) that you want to be transparent and using the little -> right arrow menu pop up – toggle it’s status between transparent or not.

This will give you explicit control over what palette index is transparent or opaque.

This will at the very least give you a correct PNG with transparency. The web, that’s another problem…

The solution could not be created in Photoshop. As far as I know, this is a known limitation of Photoshop PNGs. I had to create the PNG files in Fireworks.

Note that getting the vertical background tiles to be seamless is much harder when working with so many variables. Variables include: (a) seamless alpha tile (b) seamless IE tile and (c) seamless color tile.

As part of this process I’ve realized Fireworks produced slightly smaller images that look better than Photoshop”s (Image Ready”s) “save as web”. I tend to use Fireworks more often now for slicing images.

Giving credit where due : ) this article helped get me on the right track.

If you really want check out the details on this project”s random switching of the background images on each page and the Mambo CMS integration written by Graham Spice, the developer responsible for the project.

We’re using PNG files for the verses on our cards, which can be imprinted in various colors – that way we don’t have to create/maintain a separate file for every color a verse may be printed in. The IE filter has it’s own problems, but at least you get the desired effect.