>I need to customize a window in FB, and Andy at Staz tells me I can do this
>by creating a picture to use as the background, with transparent areas that
>my edit fields and such can show through.
>
>Can anyone give me any specifics about how I can make a picture with
>transparent areas? Any suggestions as to image editors that will help me do
>this?

If you're doing "DRAWPICTURE" or using FB's "PICTURE" statements, you 
need to set "white = transparent" in your editor _or_ simply don't copy 
the white areas to begin with (ie; use the "magic wand" to select a white 
area, then "select similar", then "invert selection" to get everything 
that's not white) when you paste the PICT into your resource file. 
Ideally, use either the System 16-color or the System 256-color palettes 
for your PICT; definitely no "thousands" or "millions" if you can avoid 
it, or you're asking for trouble (weird-looking results) on some systems.

If you're using COPYBITS, use _transparent to make the white areas 
transparent.

I use ColorIt! and Photoshop interchangeably, but if I were buying 
something just for programming, I'd definitely get ColorIt! from 
MicroFrontier. It's 1/10 the cost of Photoshop and does 99% of what you'd 
really _use_ in Photoshop, and is easier to learn. Photoshop has a true 
"transparent", but just "not selecting the white" in ColorIt! is easy and 
perhaps even more reliable. (Warning; your PICT resource will actually be 
a slight bit _bigger_ when you do this than if you did a "select all", 
because the "not copied" regions have to be "masked out".)

For images that use the System palette, just about anything will "force" 
any PICT to those colors; for photos that I have to get to 256 colors 
(but _not_ the System colors, since I want them to look realistic) I use 
Planet Color from LizardTech (I don't know if it's even still available; 
haven't seen anything about it recently) as it still does a _slightly_ 
better job of creating a custom or "adaptive" palette than even the 
latest Photoshop, although both Photoshop 4.0 and ColorIt! 3.2 are much 
better now than earlier versions.

Bill