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I had previously asked: "Is it possible to make a gif in Photoshop with a
TRULY transparent background, one that will allow the image to "float" I
guess over any
background color?"
The answer? It can't be done, basically. Elizabeth Ross (beth -at- vcubed -dot- com)
seemed to sum up the best what many others have said and what I had feared:
"...Anti-aliasing and transparent GIFs do not like each other. ...So
Photoshop happily blends the colour of your image with the colour of your
background and creates a bunch of new colours that are on the gradient
between the two.
Then, you export as a GIF with a transparent background. Photoshop converts
your background colour (100% white or grey or whatever) to transparent. But
all those anti-aliased pixels are no longer 100% background colour, so they
stay the same and you end up with a whitish or greyish border around your
image.
..Your other option is to use anti-aliasing sparingly and create several
versions with different background colours (light, dark, in-between). "
So either turn off anti-aliasing all together (not an option in this case)
or create many different files with different "transparent" colored
backgrounds.
Thanks for all your advice! This was a doozy for me!!