Onion skin issue - almost transparent

[Stephanie]

Hi (again!).

My issue this time is that the frames the onion skin shows in green and red are almost transparent, I really have to zoom in to see them (see attached screenshot).

This only happens with jpg images* (when I add a brand new frame, it works fine).

This is a very simple drawing and animation so it's not a big deal, but if possible I'd like to know the solution to avoid trouble for when I can do cooler stuff :P

*Backstory time: I'm working with .jpg because when I loaded the scene, the frames and levels were there, but the drawings were gone. I'm sure I had previously used "save all" because I'd read about this happening.

I had exported the frames as image files just in case. This doesn't matter to me, but I'm mentioning in case it's somehow related to my onion skin issue.

Thanks,

[TurtleTooth]

It looks like you might have played with the onion skin thickness in settings.

[Rodney]

Yes, this looks like the settings of Onion skin paper thickness is set too thick.

[Jane Eyre]

About the missing drawings, was there an apostrophe in the level name by any chance? There's a glitch where apostrophes in the level name corrupt the path so it looks like the drawings are missing.

[Stephanie]

No, I checked the onion settings and the paper thickness is 50 : /

Regarding the drawings, nope, the level name was "ball" (without the "")

thanks for the help!

[TurtleTooth]

I just realized you are working with jpg.  jpg doesn't support transparency, so your jpgs probably have a white background, and the onion skin is having to show through the white background,

[Stephanie]

Are there other file formats opentoonz can export to that do support transparency?

So that next time I export images as backup I know which format to pick so I can use onion skin.

Thanks!!

[Rodney]

I'll try to confine my response to formats that OpenToonz supports but please understand that formats I mention can be a bridge to other formats with transparency that OpenToonz doesn't support.

PNG is likely the most prevalent and will be the option used for most users.

It it isn't always the best format (no format is) but I use it all the time and it is currently my default format type in OpenToonz because... my target for the final image out of OpenToonz is usually the internet.

I would say the GIF animation format is my primary format (and it often is) but transparency is currently not supported.

PNG is an optimal format if your images will be displayed at any time in a web browser.

More robust formats that support transparency include TIF, TGA (targa) and EXR.  (The EXR format is currently not directly supported in OpenToonz).

TGA is a rock solid format but not one that will display in a browser.

I think PNG should work for your purposes.

If you discover it doesn't consider a format such as TGA.

[Stephanie]

Got it!

Thanks so much for such a complete answer!