totoro

Thank you for your help. I don't really know what I did wrong there, but the new drawings are looking okay. I guess I used some sort of filter which screwed up the transparency. Will be more careful with what I'm using from now on.

To tell you the truth, I've no idea anymore. But do tell, which blur should I be using if I want to make sure I don't get that outline? Alternatively, if the problem lies with blurring altogether, how do i get nice, soft, antialiased edges which will be transparent?

Here's the image. Here it looks all white, but the background is actually transparent. EXCEPT for the feathered edges around the object. It looks fine here with white background but with dark background it's horrible, as the graying/whiteish edge around the object is clearly visible. As to my process, i'm not sure i understand the question but I'll try to describe what I did. I opened a new (i guess default) image in paint.net. It is, naturally, in pdn format. Over the white background i made another layer where i drew the object in question. To make it look nicer i applied a little bit of blur to it, softening everything up. Then i erased everything from the background layer so it was transparent. At that point i had a drawing with nice soft edges, gradually disappearing into the transparent background. So then i hit save as and selected PNG. No matter what setting of transparency treshhold i chose, and no matter which bit depth i chose, the result was that the saved PNG image doesn't feature gradually disappearing edges but edges that gradually mix with white/gray outline. I don't want that white/gray outline. I want to be able to use the image over background of any color.

Why can't I get as-advertised gradual transparency when i save images i make in paint.net as PNG, while the same thing done in photoshop gives me the wanted level of transparency? (I don't want to use photoshop as it's too complicated, its UI is worse and i just love the line/curve tool in paint.net. btw, will pn 4.0 support more adjustment points in the curve? Also will there be the option of using just lines, so whenever i'm done drawing a line it will allow me to draw another one without having to press enter or select some other tool or other?) But i'm sidestepping. Here's the issue. I have a background layer which is transparent. On top of that I have a drawing of something with soft edges, nicely blending into the background. When i save the file as PNG, on auto settings, the saved result will be an image which does have a transparent background but those edges will not be transparent. Instead, it is as if the program mixed my pixels from the drawing with grey pixels in all the areas where opacity is over 0 but less than 100%. Nontransparent pixels are fine, fully transparent pixels are fine, its just that those semitransparent pixels get mixed with gray. So i get a grayish outline around my drawing. I played with manual settings when saving the file as PNG, setting the transparency treshold to various values, but to no avail. Low settings (like 25) give me that grayish outline, high settings (over 200) remove the nice gradual edges from my image altogether. What am I doing wrong? Thank you.