Why am I losing the transparency of the PNG upon export?

[eiger06]

I'm trying to create an application screen banner that is ~50% transparency. I've created the shape I want in composer and set the opacity to 50%. All looks good on the screen in composer, but once I export as a PNG file, it loses its transparency and turns into a solid gray block. Am I messing up something in the export or object creation?

Thanks

[mastamoon]

Make your .png's in an external image program like adobe photoshop or GIMP(free and awesome) then import into composer.

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[eiger06]

Thanks mastamoon. I ended up downloading GIMP and it worked great. It was bit of a learning curve learning the new program, but it ended up working in the end. Since you use that program, can you tell me if there is an easier way to draw basic shapes besides using the pencil, etc? Maybe I didn't have a toolbar active or something, but I couldn't find a way to just draw a box without doing it by hand.

Thanks

[mastamoon]

U can use the rectangle select tool to draw the square then use the fill bucket to color it in. Sorry I'm not much of an artist so I don't know exactly the best approach to do some things but usually I figure it out via trial and error.... And google! Or when u make a new canvas make it the size u need.. Like if u want to make a custom icon, just make the canvas size 80x80 or whatever.

There are tons and tons of gimp tutorials on the web too.

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[eiger06]

Awesome...thanks for the info! One thing I did that seemed to work fairly well was to make the shape in Composer (since I wanted to match an underlay shape with the curved corners on the rectangle), export it to PNG, import that image into GIMP and work with the colors and transparency there. Thanks again for the info.

[mastamoon]

Good idea! Never thought of that myself.

No problems, that's what this section, and crackberry as a whole, is good for!