How to Make a Transparent Background!!! (well... sort of)
dk00111 Tue, 07/15/2008 - 00:44
The links in this comment no longer work--
Ok, we have transparent logos, so why not have a transparent background? Well here I will show you how to do it.
Before you get too exited, I'm going to tell you right now that this isn't perfect. It only looks transparent if you don't have any windows under firefox, and if the top right corner of your firefox window isn't in the top right corner of your screen, the "illusion" won't work. If you think up of a better way of doing it, tell me =].
Now if you want to see a screenshot of how it looks when you finish click here
Note that I was a few pixels off when cropping it =[.
First you will need to get a pixel ruler. I used this one.
Then you need to use the ruler to measure the top and bottom of your firefox while it is maximized, (whether or not you want to include the tab bar is up to you. If you choose to count the tab bar, the background will be distorted when you only have one tab open, and vice versa).
After doing that, you need to take a screenshot of your desktop with all of your windows either closed, or minimized to the taskbar. To do this, hit the Prt Scrn button (usually on top of Insert and Delete). Then go to
Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Paint
Once you have opened paint hold Ctrl and press V to paste. Then save it somewhere. You will then need to edit that image so that you remove the amount of pixels that you measured from the top and bottom of your firefox, as well as the taskbar, from the top and bottom of your screen shot(this can also be done in Paint, but it is a little bit difficult...). I used Photoshop, and enabled the ruler Ctrl + R zoomed in to the top of my image until the ruler went in increments of one pixel, used the Rectangle Marquee tool, and went to Select -> Inverse Selection. Then cropped the image, by going to Image -> Crop. There are probably easier ways to do it, but I'm not a Photoshop genius =[.
Once you have done that, save your image, and use it as the background of your fastdial.
Again, like I said this isn't perfect, and could take a while, but its there for those who want to do it. =]
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Re: How to Make a Transparent Background!!! (well... sort of)
Submitted by soundofemotion on Tue, 07/15/2008 - 02:31Another way of doing this is to:
1) Open your Firefox window and go to your Fast Dial page.
2) With the Firefox window selected, hold ALT and press PrtScrn (Print Screen). What this does is takes a screenshot of only the active window.
3) Now with the screenshot of the Firefox window in your clipboard, open the image editor of your choice and paste.
4) Create a new layer and paste the background of your choice in this window.
5) With the background window selected, select a box, only the size of the "interior" of your Firefox window (i.e. not the scrollbars or toolbars or the status bar) and crop to that selection.
That's how I would approach this.
Re: How to Make a Transparent Background!!! (well... sort of)
Submitted by dk00111 on Tue, 07/15/2008 - 08:51Hmm... thats a good way too, a lot easier than my way lol
Re: How to Make a Transparent Background!!! (well... sort of)
Submitted by gumanov on Wed, 07/16/2008 - 22:55interesting tutorial dk00111 !
here is my result:
Re: How to Make a Transparent Background!!! (well... sort of)
Submitted by chiaroscuro on Tue, 03/30/2010 - 20:19For those interested in a transparent Fast Dial please see here
oh
and here