Help with creating transparent .PNG images with Paint Shop Pro 7

When you say you are having troubles with transaprencies is that once you save as a PNG or actually getting transparency in the program? If it's the former you need to Choose File->Export and export as a png. You should see the option in there to use Alpha transparency. If you mean the latter then you need to promote the background to a layer. To do this you have to be working at a colour depth of 16 million colours.

chickenbow: OK, here's how to do it (assuming you mean inbuilt per-pixel transparency). Create a new image the same size as the one you're working on. Make it greyscale. Then set the bits of the image that you want to be opaque to white, and the bits you don't to black, and the bits you want translucent in-between. Then select your original image and go to Masks/New/From Image..., select your mask image, and select Source Luminance. You should see the image become transparent in the areas you specified.

Now select Mask/Save to alpha channel..., select the current alpha channel, click OK and make a name for it (anything), then OK. Now go to Masks/Delete... (select No) and save your PNG. Hopefully it should all work. Keep the mask image around until you've finished.

err... folks, why doing it in such a difficult way?!?!
Here's an easier way:
I'm assuming you allready have the finished image.
Press shift+ctrl+v -> OK -> Select a color for transparency.
Press F12 (save as) .PNG
and hey presto you got a transparent .PNG image.
(ok it's only 256 colors, but there are transparency!!)

Yeah, that only gets you 256 colours and one level of transparency. Could use BMP for that.

thanks guys, i used bits of your advice and stumbled onto a way that worked well for me. just one level of transparency at true color, but that's okay 'cause things look fine and it was relatively easy. You guys are going to crap yourselves when you see this in thme in action... Mwahahaha