How to see

Up to date ways are listed here.

GIMP

Open Channels tab > deselect all channels but Alpha > Gradient (L) > make both Background and Foreground colors white > fill.

Photoshop

Open Image menu > Mode > Color Table. You will see the color table of the file, where the last entry is transparent. Click it and Photoshop will display “hidden” color of this entry, #e7bcff. And if you click OK now, Photoshop will replace original RGBA color with this RGB one.

Alternatively, go to Layer > Layer Mask > From Transparency. This will separate out the alpha information into a Layer Mask, which can be disabled to reveal the original image.

XnView

You can turn off support of alpha channel in XnView: Tools > Options > General > Operations > Ignore Alpha Channel > restart XnView.

Windows XP Paint

Old Windows XP Paint has no alpha support at all.

It can be downloaded here, for example: http://www.sheeptech.com/download-microsoft-paint-recover-missing-copy.

3ds Max

Open Select Bitmap Image File dialog (for example, Material Editor (M) > select Bitmap in Maps). There is an image preview area in this dialog, where alpha channel is ignored (tested in 3ds Max 2011).

MATLAB

 = imread('Ipu.png');
imshow(im, map);

Discussion

Note: The Invisible Pink unicorn can be easily found by using Paint.NET and edge-detecting. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.101.88.93 (talkcontribs)

Similarly, in GIMP (2.4.1), it can be found by going to Filters>Edge-Detect>Laplace (or Sobel). -kotra (talk) 21:48, 25 April 2008 (UTC)


An easier way to view the unicorn on Windows is to open it in Paint, which has no alpha support at all. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.169.25.117 (talk) 17:35, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Well, and it is actually not pink, but 0xE7BCFF... – Mackseem (talk) 22:05, 26 January 2010 (UTC)


You can also use XnView to see the unicorn. It supports alpha channels, but fails to render them at all, so you can clearly see it. I add this comment because this program is available in many operating systems, Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and many others. - User:Matiasmoreno 16:33, 05 November 2008 (GMT-0300)

Recent versions of XnView and Paint support alpha, but in XnView you can turn it off: Tools > Options > General > Operations > Ignore Alpha Channel > restart XnView – Mackseem (talk) 18:57, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

I can't see the unicorn. How do you open it with photoshop? – 75.61.115.56 (talk) 11:55, 05 February 2009

See the section above - Mackseem (talk) 16:30, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

image gets corrupted

Except with the original file itself (going to ), the image of the pink unicorn seems to be replaced with flat black (i tried finding the unicorn by opening the images on Gimp and painting some white (fullsolid) on the alpha channel), so the images on most pages getting the file from here, and even the preview on the file page itself, don't really have the pink unicorn...


—Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.95.187.144 (talk) 23:50, 13 January 2010 (UTC)