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I have a really newb question, but when I put a picture down it leaves a white background behind my picture, and I was wondering how you get rid of it.
That looks like you need to know how to make something "transparent".
Like, lets say I found this here picture of
Megaman, and wanted to stick him into a picture. If I did that, he'd have a black box around him, and he'd totally stick out.
So, what I would do with Photoshop is use the "pencil" and draw an outline around him with an unusual color, like 100% green or something. And color in all the rest of the black you want to get rid of too. The "magic wand" and the "paintbucket" tools are also really handy when doing this.
(By the way, this would be easier if the background wasn't black, because you'd want to keep the proper black outline around Megaman, but I couldn't find a better picture offhand to use as an example.)
Then you click "save for web" in Photoshop, which has a bunch of advanced saving features, drag the level-255 green color over to the "transparent" icon, and then all of the 100% green in the picture will go invisible.
Then I save it as a PNG. I think GIF invented the "transparent GIF" feature, but PNG was designed to be GIF's replacement, and keeps absolutely perfect image quality, so I really like it.
The end result should look like
this. It's still in a square frame, but the frame's an invisible color, so you can stick the picture on things without worrying about it.
If you want to be tricky, you can crop an edge off of him, and then put him tight up against something, and it'll look like he's halfway behind something (like I did with Shadowman in that first picture of the house).
If you don't have Photoshop, look around on the net for some sort of program called a "GIF Construction Set". I'm pretty sure that's how most of the animated and transparent GIFs on the internet get made. I don't know exactly how it works. Or where to find it (so don't blame me if you get a virus, or arrested for pirating software, or anything like that).
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By the way, where is everyone finding these pictures to put in the photo?
I usually go with videogames. Grab an emulator. Grab an illegal ROM of something. Figure out how to work the "take screenshot" feature. Turn on the "Game Genie" codes. Play tourist, wandering around really casually, parking your butt in front of end-bosses, and taking pictures of anything that strikes your fancy.
Edit: There are lots of people on the net who have made transparent gifs of things, so you can always leech some images from other people.
Also, a quick Google search for "transparent gif gallery" turned up
this website devoted to Sailor Moon-themed transparent GIFs, and they seem to have a decent tutorial about it, as well as an apparently free program to help make some. Enjoy.
(Remember for this game though,
make transparent GIFs, then
attach them to the main JPEG. Don't go converting the entire picture back-and-forth between GIF and JPEG if you don't have to.)
