musmuris

Thanks Your help is much appreciated.

Ok - thanks I was using a separate colour and then removing after merging - didn't think to make a layer below with that colour which is obvious now you suggest it! I know the Gimp has a "colour to alpha" feature that i've found useful (sadly the gimp is just way to complex for me usually!) - do you know if there's a Paint plugin that does that? cheers again for the help

To try and illustrate what I mean imagine the following 4-pixel image. In layer 1 I put 3 red pixels. Layer 2 over that has just 1 blue pixel. When merged down the resultant image has 2 red and 1 blue in it as shown below. What I what to do is (in layer 2) put a transparent pixel that overwrites the pixel below (which isn't transparent in the traditional sense) so that when merged down the result only has 1 red and 1 blue in it. Does that make more sense? I understand that these may seem slightly odd (and I have a hard time getting my own head around it) - but I figure I can overwrite in a colour so why can't I overwrite transparency

Hi, When you create a new layer over an existing one you can paint over the underlying image. Is there a way to paint transparency over the underlying image? To explain. I have a drawing of a pixel man, and I want to produce more images of him with different gestures. To do this I want to create a new layer over him and change just the bits I need by overdrawing, but I need to "erase" the bits from the underlying image that I don't want (i.e. paint transparency over it!). Then when it gets flattened it will just have the resultant image. I've found the layering works better than copying the original as if I make an error then I can just normal erase to see the underlying image again. So there's a difference between erase and painting transparency, if you see what I mean. Thanks for any advice