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A boy named Crow
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A few days ago I put a WIP tag in my signature that looked like this.

Spiketag09_14_14-vi.gif


Chances are you didn't see it, because I took it down less than an hour later after switching to a darker forum skin and discovering that Spike's head, shoulders, and feet (basically any part not overlapping the colored shapes behind him) were haloed by white pixels.

To make the tag, in After Effects I rotoscoped the image of Spike from a picture with a white background, then used "Refine Edge" to catch the details the rotobrush had missed. I then put that rotoscoped image (plus a black filled copy) onto the animated shapes I had drawn up earlier to make the design.

When I saw the 'halo' against the darker forum skin, I assumed I had made a mistake rotoscoping the image in AE and just hadn't seen it against the white/transparent alpha channel. However, when I open up the project in AE and put a dark background behind Spike, his image still shows up perfectly cut out, without any weird 'halos' or white pixels. So I'm not sure what's going on, whether it's an issue of how I rendered and exported it or something else entirely.

If you look at the image with a darker forum skin, do you see the 'halo' I am talking about? And do you have any ideas what might be causing it?

Thanks for your help!
 

C4strife

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Ya the "halo" is still there.

As far as I know, it's because the image is a .gif. From my experience, when an image with semi-transparent pixels is saved as a .gif, those semi transparent pixels turn out white. On the other hand, when viewed inside a program like Photoshop or After Effects, those semi-transparent pixels appear fine (ie. they blend with the background). To make the transparency work without the white pixels, a .png would work. With .pngs, the semi-transparent pixels will remain semi-transparent allowing the image to blend with the background. However, you can't have animations with that file format.

The only way that I can think to get your sig to work on all skin colors would be to fix each semi-transparent pixel one by one, but that is very tedious and would be hard with animation. So I hate to say this, but you're kind of out of luck. Someone else with more experience with pop-out sigs may know otherwise though.
 

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Thanks! I hadn't even realized some pixels could be rendered as "semi-transparent," nor that .gif format would turn those into white. I'll check online to see if there's a way to get around this, but thanks for giving me an idea of what the problem is!
 

Max

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I use a lighter forum skin, so I didn't notice it at first until I switched to check it out. I'm really no help I. This field (sorry), but I came to post anyway just to say I hope you get it figured out, because it is a freaking awesome piece of work!
 

Pablo

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It's just left over pixels that weren't cut out from the white background. You could take the original image into photoshop and just get a really close cut out of it, and just make sure that there's no left over white pixels.
 

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It's just left over pixels that weren't cut out from the white background. You could take the original image into photoshop and just get a really close cut out of it, and just make sure that there's no left over white pixels.
That's what I had originally thought as well, but when I put it against a black background in After Effects I couldn't find any evidence of left over white pixels. What C4strife says above about semi-transparent pixels being converted into white pixels, though I had never heard of it before, seems to make the most sense with what I'm seeing. But I'll look over it in Photoshop and see if I can't tighten the cut there.

I use a lighter forum skin, so I didn't notice it at first until I switched to check it out. I'm really no help I. This field (sorry), but I came to post anyway just to say I hope you get it figured out, because it is a freaking awesome piece of work!
Thank you! I was really disappointed when I had to take it down because of the issue with the white pixels, but I'll see about fixing that when I have some more time. I was planning on doing an entire series with the Cowboy Bebop cast, so hopefully I can find a way to put those on the forums too.
 

C4strife

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Maybe this will illustrate it. I made a normal circle in Photoshop on a transparent background and filled it with dark red. No tricks, nothing fancy. When I saved the same Photoshop image with different file formats, I got this. (View this on a dark skin)
Gif:
ZD2Rlqh.gif


Png:
agRKroI.png


On the edge of the circle there's semi-transparent pixels which seem to mess up gif images. As far as I know, that's why people make gifs usually with choppy, hard edges (for example, sprites)

Edge of the circle:
w4M5r9I.jpg


Hope this clarifies things
 
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Max

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Thank you! I was really disappointed when I had to take it down because of the issue with the white pixels, but I'll see about fixing that when I have some more time. I was planning on doing an entire series with the Cowboy Bebop cast, so hopefully I can find a way to put those on the forums too.

Wow, I would love to see more of the with the rest of the cast, that would be pretty awesome! I tried looking stuff up to help, but my lack of knowledge in the field really led me to nothing useful :/
 

Pablo

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Yeah C4, thats basically what I was talking about, but I didn't think the transparent pixels would extend that far out, which was why it led me to believe it was just a bad cut.
 
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