Image Transparency (URGENT PLEASE HELP)

[khanjan_a2k]

Hey,
I am working on building this chess program. I just started and I had a little problem. Well I have images of pieces that will be moved around the board. The problem is that pieces can be moved from a dark square to a light square or vice versa. So the background colour of the image cannot remain same.

The background colour is going to be white... So is there any way that the background colour of the image can be made transparent. Also is it possible that we can set the white colour to be transparent or the colour that most occures in the image (i.e. white) to be transparent.

Please help me out or else I will have to do twice the work by making pieces with two types of background colours and also have to check which square the piece is on.

Any help would be appreciated.

Khanjan