Visit the following thread, for one easy solution (before you Save For Web as a transparent GIF or PNG file):
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http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.3bc34571>
With that image you posted…you may want to first go to Image—>Adjustments—>Selective Color…
Choose "White" from the drop down menu and yank all the sliders fully left. Hit OK. Apply again, if the gray haze doesn’t completely drop out. You may have to do some manual erasure on any larger specks you want to get rid of.
Bret, the simple answer to your question is as follows: Make sure your image is on a regular layer, not the background. Use the magic wand tool, with "contiguous" UNchecked and a tolerance that depends on how even the "white" is that you want to select (for pure white, set it to 0, but to select white that varies a bit, set it higher, perhaps 20 or 30 — play with it), and click on the white. Press the delete key to eliminate it (i.e., replace white with nothing).
Before you do that, you may want to use a Levels adjustment to make the whites really white and the blacks really black.
If the image is antialiased and you want to superimpose the resulting line drawing on a background with nonwhite colors, things get a little more complicated.
Just for the record…I’m rather opposed to using the Magic Wand on the grounds of "clunkiness."
🙂
Thank you Phos and Michael. I forgot step one (don’t try anything on the background layer) and I forgot about the magic wand. Thank you!
"I forgot about the magic wand."
::harrumph!::
😐
XD
Go to the Composite (RGB or CMYK) channel. Ctrl-click on it to make a selection. Inverse (Shift-Ctrl-I) the selection. Fill the selection (Alt-Delete) with black (or whatever color you want) on a new transparent layer. Trash the old layer.
Couldn’t be easier. Well, it could…make an action of it and assign it to an F key.
PMJI, but I also need to turn a white background transparent, if possible.
It’s a stock photo with a white background, basically an irregularly shaped image in the middle of a white area. It’s not great quality — there is at least one overexposed area in the image that is essentially white. It’s at the edge of the image, so it gets selected along with the white background. There’s also a shadow at the bottom right of the image, and sections of it are apparently white, because they get selected too.
I set my magic wand tolerance to 0.
There’s no easy way to do this, is there? Would I need to create a clipping path (after wanding) and then edit the path so the overexposed areas are NOT inside the clipping path? If so, when I edit the clipping path (something I don’t have much experience with), is there a way to select multiple points or nodes or whatever they’re called, and delete them at the same time? When I tried it, it deleted the points all right, but also broke the path so it was no longer joined.
TIA for any suggestions. This is, of course, a rush job. <sigh>
Marlene
Marlene:
To edit the path, explore the pen tool and its variants
C. Nomad,
I have been fiddling with the pen tool variants, but can’t find a way to delete a bunch of points at once without breaking the path. If I have to delete each unneeded point one by one, it will take me a week!
How ’bout:
Select > Color Range, using "Selected Color" option. The ‘Fuzziness’ control is nice and interactive. Maybe touch-up the result in Quick Mask. Then add a mask, or press Delete for "real" transparency.
Hi Fontessa,
Providing you want to change ALL the white to transparent, make sure the image is on a proper layer, not a background layer. Then select Layer>Layer Style>Blending Options.
At the bootom of the dialog box you will find two sliders, ‘This Layer’ and ‘Underlying Layer’. Move the ‘This Layer’ highlight slider very slightly towards the centre. The white will become transparent.
Save as .PSD.
Jeebus…there are 3 different people in this thread asking about 3 different images. And one sounds like it’s for print.
And there have been several techniques offered.
This is starting to get a little messy.
