I want to say this first.  Making a good heart or globe transparency is one of the hardest things to do.  It's not in the actual making of the animation, it's the problem with what happens around the edges of a globe or a heart type shape.  This tutorial is going to try and cover all the problems that may come up.  After the first section of pages in this tutorial, there is a work-along section where we do three different type hearts together.  If you choose the Gold Heart, this is the easiest and may be what you should try first.  If you are feeling overwhelmed, after going over these first three pages of instructions, then move on to page 1 of the work-along and do the Gold Heart.

To teach this tutorial, I'm going to be using materials from Deb's heart tutorial.  What I'm going to concentrate on is building your heart in the best manner to assure a good transparency. Then I'll take you step by step through the process of turning the final images into perfect transparent gifs.

*Basic Class students should already have this next section done from customizing the toolbar.

Before I start on the heart itself I want to show you how I have my top toolbar setup.  I have 3 items on mine that I would like to see you add.  To add them, go to File, Preferences, Customize Toolbar.  Add the Increase Colors to 16 million, Decrease Colors to 256, and Set Transparency.  Well......the two dealing with increasing and decreasing should be easy to spot, they are the two arrows on the right hand side of the second image.  The set transparency is the red and yellow rectangles on the top image.

I've picked the 3 images I'm going to need to complete this.  I'm using one of Deb's red hearts, one of her bases and an edited image of a mouse from her image zip files.

The first step is to create a new blank transparent image.  I'm going to make it 400x400 pixels to give me room to work.  You should name this layer in the Layer Palette as Background.  You will add color to this background layer later on.

Now I'm ready to start working on my heart.  I export the red heart as a tube.  Add a new layer to your 400x400 image named heart.  On this layer add the heart by using the Tube tool.  I added mine at 50%.

Next copy the image you are going to use and add it as a new layer.  You should name this layer as Image.  Move this layer under the heart layer.  I used the deform tool to size the image to a better fit inside the heart.