I have been illustrating my blog with images gathered from here and there on the web. In fact some of those images have been linked to by the web pages of others according to my web stats. I have found that Microsoft’s Photo Editor to be the easiest tool so far to make backgrounds transparent. There’s an arrow in the toolbar that you point to the background. They even provide a “fuzziness” setting so that you could, for example, make a sky of several shades of blue transparent. As you can see in the accompanying Help About box it appears this application didn’t come from Microsoft originally. It certainly isn’t as bloated or patronizing as Word seems to be.