Specifying Transparency in an Image

[John Blanco]

I'm working on a game where I have a PNG image of several cells. I load the whole PNG into a BufferedImage and now I want to copy out specific regions of the larger graphic into their own Image objects.

The problem I hit is that I want the transparency preserved. Unfortunately, that's not happening. How can I create this Image (which I get by calling drawImage on the larger image into the smaller one) while getting the transparency info as well?

PS - This is known as "filmstripping" in game programming...but I can't find the answer elsewhere. :-(