Setting a colour as 'transparent' without saving

[sisom]

Hi, I'm trying to insert an object into another picture, it's a letter 'O', and I want it to have a transparent background, so that the 'O' sits nicely on the new picture - is there any way to set the background colour (which is #F1ECCE) to transparent, before I paste it into the new picture?

I know I can save it as a GIF or PNG with a transparent background first, but I thought there must be a quicker way. (I cut the 'O' from another picture, it's an image file, not a .UFO file, so it isn't editable text).

I tried right clicking and going to Properties, then I set transparency to 99 (and also tried 50) and then set the Transparent Colour to #F1ECCE, but it didn't work, it just made the 'O' invisible!

Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere, I did search here and on Google but couldn't find anything.

[Ron P.]

How are you selecting it and copying it? I just ran a quick test. I grabbed a photo from Oreo, a popular cookie, then using the Magic wand tool, selected the O, which was the white part. It had some slight gray at the bottom. I then converted that to an object. I then selected the object (O), in the layers palette, went to the Edit menu, selected Copy. I then switched to another photo I had open, and from the Edit menu chose Paste as Object. The center was transparent, which in the original Oreo image has a blue center.

oreo.jpg (11.47 KiB) Viewed 2593 times

I guess I'm not fully understanding the problem you're having.

You could easily save the image your getting your "O" from as a UFO. When you first open it in PI, press [CTL] + D, this creates a duplicate which is a UFO format.