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When I open a transparent background PNG, I see a grey-white grid.

Is the grid embedded into the file? How can I change it?

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  • Oh my god, I'm aghast someone with ~1.5K rep asked this. I don't want to offend or anything, but it's one of those things I thought nobody would ask, like where the sun goes at night.
    – Camilo Martin
    Jul 2, 2012 at 21:23

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That's there to show that it's a transparent background; it's not actually embedded since it's just the way it's displayed in Photoshop. When you drop that onto your web page / document you won't see the grid.

You can change the parameters for the grid in Photoshop → Preferences → Transparency & Gamut.

enter image description here

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    Note to @Kev: other programs use this too. The 'gray/white checkerboard' is the general metaphor for transparent areas of a transparent imgage file.
    – Rich Homolka
    Aug 23, 2011 at 18:26
  • @kev, hello, I'm facing a situation where several images I have downloaded from the web, all having that "checkerboard" as a background ARE indeed showing said checkerboard in my site instead of being invisible/transparent as it should, whether I load them as part of a css background or straight in an img's src attribute. I doubt every image I have downloaded has the same problem and I'm not very skilled in PS. please help
    – Scaramouche
    Jan 15, 2019 at 20:57
  • @Scaramouche: Photoshop does not embed the checkerboard into the image, and I don't think any other image editing application or library does that either. What you describe could mean that the checkerboard background was intentionally added to those images by the designer, perhaps to replicate what you would see in photoshop. If that's the case, you might have to manually edit the images to mask out the background.
    – Håken Lid
    Oct 21, 2019 at 13:17
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A lot of websites post "pseudo" png's which are in fact jpg's with the photoshop checkerboard to make beleive, but the file doesn't really have transparency (be weary of picturename.png.jpg for instance). Even professional stock photo websites do it, its a really annoying and pointless practice and I wish people would stop doing it.

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