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Many images on the Web show an object on a white or transparent background. When that image is copied and pasted into a document (e. g. MS Office Word/Powerpoint), the colors (esp. background colors) are sometimes inverted (e. g. black instead of white). Why is that? I've confirmed it with GIF and PNG images, but I think I've seen it with JPEGs and maybe some other image types too.

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Raster file formats that support transparency include GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF (not JPG though), through either a transparent colour or an alpha channel. Software that doesn't support these features will just end up substituting the transparent portion with some colour like white or black instead.

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  • So why the difference between Paste and Insert?
    – WBT
    Apr 25, 2015 at 23:28
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    It depends on which format is used when the image is copied to the clipboard (i.e. DIB, 24bpp, 32bpp etc., some of which may lead to loss of transparency). For example, the transparent dice PNG on this page can be saved and opened in Paint and it shows a white background. If you right-click the same image in Firefox and Copy image, then paste in Paint, the background turns black. A program's Insert image or Open image functions will not involve the clipboard obviously.
    – Karan
    Apr 25, 2015 at 23:39
  • Because PASTE probably gives you a Windows bitmap, which doesn't support transparency. INSERT inserts the image in the original PNG/JPG format the file was saved in; if the format supports transparency (PNG, GIF to some extent, TIF) then PPT respects the transparency settings.
    – Steve Rindsberg
    Apr 26, 2015 at 17:21
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It is an easy way for someone writing the program to highlight an object in the foreground without knowing any of the background objects attributes. It is way easier to tell a cursor that whenever Condition X is happening, the cursor's pixels should all change to display the inverted color of the pixels below. If the people coding had to code each pixel's display color instead of telling them all at once to look down and invert, we probably would all be better using terminals:)

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As described above, the black colour is the app (e.g. Word) making different assumptions about the background that the transparent areas are letting you see than that made by the app where the image originated. Despite normally having a white page, Word seems to think that the area under the image is black!

You can overcome this effect, at least in Word, by setting the "Fill" colour of the picture to white: right-click on the picture --> Format Picture --> Fill --> Solid/White. The coloured areas of the picture now render the same as before, but the transparent areas now show as white.

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