Creating GIF Images Without White Borders Problem in Photoshop

GIF images are a good choice in low size and transparency support for most web designers. But the big problem that most designers face is the white border that shows up around your transparent GIF image while saving them from Photoshop or other software.

Actually, this white border happens when GIF images does not calculate the transparency very well as this format compress the colors to the limit or may be distorting the colors if you try to decrease the size a little bit more using the GIF setting.

In this quick tutorial, we will show how to avoid these white borders with using the Matting feature in Photoshop. Actually, the matting feature allows you to only replace this white border with your background color so it looks better and the image consists well with the background.

As we see in figure01, the floral motive on the left is in GIF format, and it shows not clean edges with white background while the one on the right (PNG-24 format) has a better edges.

The following steps shows how to save your object in GIF format without this undesired edges using the Matte option in the Save for Web & Devices in Adobe Photoshop CS3:

1-Open the transparent image you want to save as GIF in Photoshop CS3.

2-From File menu choose Save for Web & Devices.

3-From the left panel of the dialog box, choose the GIF format from the drop-down menu.

4-Make sure that the Transparency check box is checked.

5-The Matte drop down-menu gives you ability to choose the color that GIF will treat the edges with. For example, you can choose the Foreground to select the foreground color, Background to choose the background color and you can choose a custom color from the Other option (figure02).

6-Choose the color that is the same color that you will use your GIF image with. For example, if you are using HTML color code, you can add the same color the will be shown behind the image.

Some people just go to use PNG instead of GIF, but in some cases like banners, some CMS systems, it is required to have GIF images for transparent images.