I have 3 books on Photoshop and I am struggeling to work out how to make buttons, logo's etc and put them into a web page. The web page has a colour gradient running from blue to white. Now how does one get a logo with a transparent back ground to blend in with the web page without having a square box around the logo? If anyone could recomend a tutorial somewhere I would be very greatfull. Thanx

I would use a combination of Photoshop and Image Ready. Do your buttons with all the effects of the button states in Photoshop then jump over to Image Ready to do the roll overs, making layers/effects visible or invisible. You can do single buttons or nav bars. Images must be saved as GIF format to have the transparent background. You can also save the html with the code for the buttons and for the preload images. If any of your Photoshop books have a section on Image Ready then that is where you should be looking. Image Ready is for animation, roll overs, image mapping, slicing and optimizing plus more.

Thanx for the advice dreamer101. I will look into it.

PNG graphics can also do transparency -- and with a greyscale alpha mask at that -- but not all browser support it.

Internet Explorer can also apply finters, including an alpha channel sourced from a seperate greyscale image, internally. Netscpae doesn't support it.

For a fake-out semitransparency effect, like a gradated drop shadow, the following works okay:

Make the image 3 times the resolution you want it displayed at. Copy marged and paste into a nee file. Change to greyscale mode, discrading colours. Change again to a screened bitmap mode (so your greys come out as a halftone).
Select all and copy.

Go back to the original image and create a new channel. IN the channel, paste the copied bitmap mode image. Then DON'T use save for web (just for this trick). Instead, use the File->Export->GIF89a plugin. Set the alpha channel as the transparency mask.

When loading the image into the web page, set the height and width to 1/3 their actual value (i.e. a 300x300 pixel image would have height="100" width="100"). The image will appear to have a semitransparency to it. Works best over patterns, strangely.