How do you create an art show for yourself?

How can I create tranparent/opaque images in photoshop so colors & complex web page backgrounds show through?

• I've just started building a personal web page, and I've found plenty of advice on the web for how to create transparent gifs where you essentially have a solid image/logo/word art, but allow the background to show through so your image appears to hover over the background. What I want to do, however, is create an image with opacity (say 50% or so) that I can add to my web page (and be recognizably visible), yet still allow the web page background (whether a solid color, or a more complex tiled background or gradient) to show through. I've tried creating a two layer image in photoshop with my foreground image opacity set at 50% and then deleting the background layer, but when I paste the resulting gif or png onto my web page, it still appears to be an opaque image with a white background, as opposed to an opaque image over my existing web page background. Any advice would be greatly apprciated. Many many thanks!

• Answer:

  What you can do is to choose the Eraser tool, then where you see the navigation screen and all of its tabs (the one that shows a thumbnail of your image), choose the tab that's called "preferences" or "settings"; it's the one all the way to the right. Set the opacity to 50%, then erase your entire image, taking care not to go over the same spot more than once. The result should be your desired image, plus a detectable checkerboard background that indicates that your image is slightly transparent. If that doesn't work, let me know.