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GraphicsAcademy.com > Glossary > Transparency

Transparency

Transparency is simply a method of allowing a bitmap to occlude some areas when it is placed on top of something else, and to show the background through in other areas.

This is necessary because bitmaps are generally rectangular, and we therefore can simply produce an irregularly-shaped bitmaps which covers only the areas of the background that we might want to.

A simple method of producing transparency is for the bitmap to have the transparent areas denoted by some chosen color which will be treated as if transparent, and this is the method used by the GIF file format. The problem however with this simple method is that it tends to produce sharp edges as it does not allow anti-aliasing with the background.

A more sophisticated method of producing transparency which does allow anti-aliasing is alpha transparency.

Related Pages on this site:

Alpha Transparency (Definition)
Blending (Definition)
Composite (Definition)
Layer (Definition)

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