ACDSee: Changing the background colour of a transparent PNG/GIF image

Rather than use images with transparencies, it is often preferable to replace transparent pixels with a suitable background colour.

In ACDSee 4, the background colour of transparent PNG files (or any other image file that supports transparency) is by default set to black. There is no immediately apparent option whereby you can change this colour and then save the file as a JPG or similar. After some asking around, I was told that while it is possible to customise this colour, it's a bit of a pain. Here's how:

1. You need to be in ACDSee's primary window - not the Preview window and not the Edit window as they do not allow access to the menu that we need.
2. In the primary window, click on the Tools menu and then the Plug-in Settings menu.
3. In the dialog that appears, we should be in the Image Decode tab. Scroll down the plug-ins table within until you arrive at the entry for IDE_ACDStd.apl. The associated file types listed under the File Types column should include a list of standard image formats such as BMP, PNG, JPG and GIF.
4. Double-click this entry (or select it and click on the Properties button).
5. In the new dialog, there should be a Background Color colour-picker. Choose the colour of your choice.
6. Click OK to close all the open dialogs and also close ACDSee
7. Now, reopen ACDSee and view the image in question. It should have its transparent background set to the chosen colour,

These steps will unfortunately need to be repeated every time the background colour needs to be changed.

Hope this helps! Please leave a comment if you are aware of better ways to accomplish this :)