How to make a GIF with a transparent background

1. Open the studio.
2. Under Canvas background, tick Transparent. The canvas turns into a grey checkerboard. On a phone, tap ☰ first to open the tools, then Close.
3. Draw only the parts that should be visible. Leave the rest as checkerboard.
4. Press Save GIF. On a phone or tablet it is the GIF button after the word Save. The checkerboard areas come out see-through.

The checkerboard is not part of your image. It is how the studio shows which pixels are empty.

Press Import in the studio and pick the animated GIF. Each frame comes in as its own frame with the original timing. If the GIF has see-through pixels and your project was empty, the background switches to Transparent for you, so the GIF stays transparent when you save it. Add text or drawing on top, then press Save GIF.

A GIF with a solid white or coloured background cannot be made transparent with one click here. You can rub the background out with the eraser, frame by frame, which works for short, small GIFs.

Do not flood-fill the background or lay down a base colour to be safe. Every pixel you paint is solid in the export and every pixel you leave empty stays see-through. The eraser takes a pixel back to transparent.

Put moving parts on their own layers over a still transparent area, the same as any other animation. See making a GIF frame by frame.

A GIF pixel is either fully solid or fully invisible. There is nothing in between, so no 50% transparent pixels and no soft fade to clear.

A normal brush leaves soft, half-see-through pixels around every stroke. When you save a GIF, each of those is forced to be solid or gone, so a smooth curve can end up with a slightly jagged edge.

Tick Pixel mode (hard edges), under Brush size. The pen, eraser and shapes then draw whole pixels in the exact colour with no soft edge, so what you see is exactly what the GIF saves. It turns on by itself for canvases of 64 px or smaller.

Flat colour, clean shapes and a bold outline around the whole subject all export well. Avoid blur and faint drop shadows at the edge of the artwork, because GIF cannot show them.

Watch for a pale halo. Artwork drawn on white and then made transparent keeps a thin white fringe that shows up on dark backgrounds. Starting on a transparent canvas avoids it. Otherwise, go round the edges with the eraser or draw a fresh outline.

Pick 112 × 112 or 128 × 128 in the canvas size list. Discord custom emoji must be under 256 KB and Twitch animated emotes under 1 MB. After you press Save GIF, the message that pops up shows the file size. If it is too big, use fewer frames, fewer colours or a lower frame rate. The GIF file size guide has more ways to shrink it.

GIF keeps the transparency. Save PNG keeps full, smooth transparency, but only for one frame. An MP4 or WebM video cannot be transparent at all, so for a moving image with a see-through background, GIF is the format to use.

Before you use it, look at the finished GIF on both a light and a dark background. A fringe or a stray solid pixel is easy to miss on a background that matches the colour you drew against.