Background transparency in Paint

Hi all,

Since I'm still using Paint for most graphical parts of my designs, I was wondering if anyone knows it this amazing program (a-hum) is capable of making transparent backgrounds? Whenever I make something, the stuff I don't 'paint' on is automatically rendered as white, not transparent, and I couldn't find info about it anywhere in Paint itself.

On a totally unrelated note (more a-hum), I don't mean to start a major discussion about this, but can anyone offer advise on a good (open source, or at least free) program that can do more than Paint? I don't need to touch up photographs or anything, I can ask my brother to do that for me if I need a photograph edited. I mainly use it to make background images for elements (to supply them with rounded corners, for instance) and more stuff like that.

Thanks :)

but can anyone offer advise on a good (open source, or at least free) program that can do more than Paint? Yes, GIMP (http://www.gimp.org)!

MS Paint Transparency Tutorial: http://redrum-love.deviantart.com/art/MS-Paint-Transparency-Tutorial-132487892

Paint only produces bitmap/raster images, transparency requires indexed colours.

Paint tools (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Paint-tools)

At/near bottom"
Choose Solid Background or Transparent Background when you copy and paste part of a picture using the Free-Form Select or the Select tool. When you use the Solid Background option, the background color is included in your selection when you paste it somewhere else in the picture. When you use the Transparent Background option, the background color is not included in the selection, so any areas using that color are transparent and allow the rest of the picture to appear in its place.

Making A Selected Portion Have a Transparent Background~ in MS Paint (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Paint-tools)(Video)

M$ Paint makes poor quality print images and has a lousy compression algorithm for jps. Getpaint.net (http://www.getpaint.net/) is a much better and easier tool to use. Especially for removing backgrounds and making them transparent.

GetPaint Plug-ins (http://paintdotnet.forumer.com/viewforum.php?f=16)
GetPaint Help File (http://www.getpaint.net/doc/latest/en/index.html)

I'm still using Paint for most graphical parts of my designs...is a much better and easier tool to use....

The simplest and best tool I've found for making part of an image transparent is ImageMagick, which you can get for Windows, as well as Mac, Linux or BSD. It's a whole command line suite of image tools. Running just one line of code can let you change one image or a directory full of images.

mogrify -transparent '#000' *.gif