PNG Files

[johnss09]

Greetings-I am new to digiscrapping...I have made my first few layouts, but I am confused with PNG files...can anyone give me the low down on them? when I open them up in the PSE4 editor, I am unable to move them to my layout? I click on the move tool and hold down the shift key to try to move it to my layout and id doesn't work...HELP..what am I doing wrong? Any ideas would be helpful! Thank you-Sara from MN (johnss09)

[Hollie]

I don't know-I wish I could help! PSE4 should support PNG files with no problems but I don't use PSE so I don't know if maybe you are doing something incorrectly or there is just something you are not doing that you need to do.

But I can tell you some basics about PNGs. It is just a file format (like JPEG is a file format) that supports transparency. That means that if you want a graphic like a button, bow or ribbon (for examples) you can save them on a rectangular canvas but it does not "glue" it onto a background. So when you open the button or whatever element, you can move the button only, and not a button mounted on a rectangular of white. This enables us to put all those fun elements on our layouts. The native PSE file format (.PSD) supports transparency also but it isn't compatible with a lot of software. So we use PNG because it is "universal" like a JPEG is pretty universal. But JPEG does not support layers or transparency.

Okay I hope that made sense! Oh yeah, and I've been reading a bit about .TIFF files which supposedly also support transparency, layers and are pretty universal. I don't know how they compare to .PNG but supposedly they are much smaller than .PSD files. So now I'm off the subject, huh? ROTFL

I hope you can figure out your problem and get those PNG's on your LOs!!! And I hope I at least gave you some useful info without confusing you! I have a problem with always overexplaining