Why is there a grid behind a transparent background PNG?

Question

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?

Solution

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.

Comments

[Camilo Martin]

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.

[Rich Homolka]

Note to @Kev: other programs use this too. The 'gray/white checkerboard' is the general metaphor for transparent areas of a transparent imgage file.

[Scaramouche]

@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

[Håken Lid]

@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.