transparency & rollovers

[billybonds]

hi

i want to make a rollover where the original button is a yellow star with writing on it (it's for an appeal) and the rollover will be the same star with a corona effect to highlight it.

on the page it is going on to it is not possible to place it in a place where the background is a single flat colour so it needs transparency - however .gif and .png-8 destroy the corona effect and .png-24 is a LARGE file
what would be the best way around this (if there is a way...)

thanks a lot,

jim

[limbo]

What software are you using?

[billybonds]

I'm using photoshop 7 & imageready

cheers,

jim

[limbo]

I predominantly use fireworks so not sure if I can help.

Are you trying to get the corona effect to have the detail of the page below to show through? I think this is impossible with GIFs - as you know they dont have the depth of tranparecy but they will irradicate your file size issue. If you could harness glow around the star but not worry too much about the back ground showing through you could use the alpha channel and a rollover.

[billybonds]

hmmmm...

yeah i do want the background detail to show through. i guess i'll just have to look for a different effect - shame though!

thanks for your help

jim

[limbo]

Could you incorporate the background into the image? - as though you had sliced it. That way there would be no need for transparency and you could add as little or as much colourful corona as you wanted.

Ta

limbo

[billybonds]

hi limbo

i hadn't thought of that... it sounds possible although a little tricky taking into account my limited CSS skills (the positioning side of things is not my strongest!)

i'll ponder that one.....

cheers

jim

[limbo]

Actually I thought that if the background you were using was fixed positionally under you star then you could use it as the background for your images in their 'rollover' and 'off' states. I guess the simplest way would be to screen capture the section of background and paste it as you background in PS and then add the corona.

Of course this is totally dependant on the layout of your content - IE. is is fluid or fixed. But if you could fix only the background around your image and have the rest of the page fluid...?

[billybonds]

actually my page is fixed so the problem isn't there - well it's probably easy (ish) i just need to learn how to use the z-index properly in conjunction with positioning across a couple of divs

thanks for your help and ideas

jim