Changing colour to transparent

GH
Posted By
Graham_Hart
Feb 10, 2004
Views
4728
Replies
9
Status
Closed
Hi,
I am new to using Photo Shop Elements and I seem to be doing something wrong here…

Some people I am working with supplied me with some gif images which should have had a transparent background. (they created them in Illustrator and exported them as gif.

When I use the images on the web, there is a pixel or two of light (white) on the border of the transparent areas. This ruins the image and makes them unusable as they stand.

The people who suplpied them to me are not sure how to fix it in illustrator.

What I want to do in Photoshop elements is to read is to select the offending pixels (the rest of the image is fairly dark so its a reasonably narrow range of colours) and just tell them to be transparent.

I tried to follow through the use of the Replace Colour option to change the selected pixels. I think I select the pixels ok .. but I was hoping to be able to change them to transparent, but the options are Hue Saturation and Lightness. Is there a combination of these that is considered transparent ?

The sort of thing I was looking for was a tool that I could brush around the image with which changed one colour to another …

Anyway .. enough rambling .. I hope that this explains the problem .. I would appreciate any advice…

(also, if anyone happens to know why this happens in Illustrator, I would appreciate knowing that .. I could get the other guys to produce them correctly 🙂 )

Cheers and thanks, in advance, for your help …

Graham
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change color transparency

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JF
Jodi_Frye
Feb 10, 2004
if you are able to select the pixels in question with say, the ‘magic wand’ tool then you can just click delete on the keyboard. Sometimes this happens when certain layer styles applied to an outer pixel range that isn’t apparent until you go to save it as a gif. If you really can’t be rid of the pixels another thing to do is to use the save for web command and choose the ‘matte’ color option that is the same as your webpage. There are just so many ways to ‘fix’ things in Elements and if you could see the image i could probably be of more help.
BG
Byron Gale
Feb 10, 2004
Graham,

To make part of your image transparent, after you have it selected, DELETE it.

Byron
BG
Byron Gale
Feb 10, 2004
Jodi, of course, is correct — and quicker on the draw than I.
JF
Jodi_Frye
Feb 10, 2004
lol…ya, i meant if ‘I’ could see the image…..duh
NS
Nancy_S
Feb 10, 2004
Graham,

Maybe this would work; try on a copy…

Unwanted color around perimeter of transparent background: * Select>All
* Select>Modify>Contract (1 or 2 pixels)
* Select>Inverse>Delete
* if you needed the image EXactly the size it was, add back in the number of deleted pixels by Image>Resize>Canvas Size

Unwanted light color surrounding image within transparent background: * pull down Layers Palette from well
* Ctrl/click (for Windows) on layer containing image
* Select>Modify etc same as above
GH
Graham_Hart
Feb 10, 2004
Thanks Jodi,

The delete certainly helped 🙂 .. that was the key I was looking for ..

The background of some of the images will be multi-coloured, so I wouldn’t be able to set a single matte colour…

There are a lot of images that need to be converted like this… so I would still be interested in knowing the cause if possible…

I would happily send you a couple of examples .. can I attach files to the forum messages ?

Thanks again for the help

Cheers

Graham
NS
Nancy_S
Feb 10, 2004
Graham,

Perhaps they had "anti-alias" on, or a feather…
GH
Graham_Hart
Feb 11, 2004
Hi,

Thanks for all the suggestions ..

Nancy, I tried the contract option .. its a useful method and worked well with one of the images … but some of the lines are too thin and the added pixels aren’t quite regular enough … but thanks for the option 🙂

I have now converted about 6 of the images and they are fine .. I can see with the other ones that I will not be able to ‘reverse’ them in this way … a few of them have white text on a transparent background and the pixels added are also white .. so I would have to recreate the font 🙂

I think the idea of anti-aliasing when they exported from Illustrator makes sense .. I’ll ask them tomorrow to either export them without that option .. or I’ll get them to send me them with a fixed backgournd made up of a colour not found in the image .. then I can select and change that colour to transparent in Photoshop Elements..

Thank you all very much for your help .. it’s appreciated ..

cheers

Graham
NS
Nancy_S
Feb 11, 2004
Ouch…it sounds like there were quite a few vagrants…

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