This tutorial will show you how to make those cool transparent tables that you see in many web sites today. The idea behind this is to make a small square shape that is half transparent and then to make that image the background of a table. So here we go. First off make a new file with the settings below

after you have your picture up it is going to be way to small. So you are going to half to zoom in a bunch of times. Zoom in exactly to the point were the transparent background leaves 2 checkers in your picture. Like seen below

Next we are going to fill in two of those checkers with the same color. If the background of your site is a dark color than you are going to want it with a light gray color. If your background is a light color than you are going to want to fill it in with a darker gray color. For mine a used a nice light gray.

Next off you are going to need to select the pencil tool, and set the pencil length to I pixel.

Select the smallest dot. And then go back to your picture. What you are going to have to do is color in the two darker squares on each corner of the image. Take the pencil tool And position it over the one of the corner squares. Because each of these squares are exactly a pixel in length, when you draw with the pencil tool it will automatically draw in in the square. So position the pixel tool somewhere above the top right square. and press the left mouse key. Next to the same thing the the square diagonal to it. Your image should now look like this

the darker squares are the pixels that I drew and the lighter ones are the transparent background.

Well that's about it, now just go to file>save and save it as a gif file. Leave all the gif save options on the default settings. Now go into Dreamweaver, or whatever program you have, or just handcode it. When you make a table make sure you make the bg image of it Your transparent gif.