Cutting out objects and saveing them with no background

EB
Posted By
Ernie_Brigham
Apr 28, 2004
Views
653
Replies
4
Status
Closed
Can anybody help, is it possible to cut an object or a person from a photo or from a scan. Then save it with a clear background, so that I can place it in powerpoint or in to artwork. I want to cut our company logo out from a scaned document however when I do I am always left with a background even when I use the magic wand. So I am doing something wrong hope you can help

Regards

Ernie
Related Tags
background cut object

Master Retouching Hair

Learn how to rescue details, remove flyaways, add volume, and enhance the definition of hair in any photo. We break down every tool and technique in Photoshop to get picture-perfect hair, every time.

MM
Mac_McDougald
Apr 28, 2004
Make the background a layer by double clicking it in the layer palette. Then it will be transparent when you do the same thing you’ve been doing.

Save it as TIFF with Transparency checked. PowerPoint supports transparent tiff. Might look poor on preview page but prints okay and look good in slide show mode.

Or save as GIF, which also preserves transparency, but only 256 colors, which might be as good or better depending on nature of your logo.

Mac
J
JPWhite
Apr 28, 2004
The way I would approach this is to put the selected logo onto a separate layer and move it to its own document. To do so select the logo (and use CTRL-C and CTRL-V to copy and paste the selected pixels to a new layer. (When selecting you can use a variety of tools, the magnetic lasso way work well depending on the shape).

Now create a new document (File New) and fill it with transparency. Make sure you create the new document with the same resolution as the original. The empty transparent document should look like a checkerboard because transparency is represented by a checkerboard to differentiate transparency from white backgrounds.

With both documents open and visible, drag the new ‘logo only’ layer from the old document to the new document. You may have to get the eraser out to tidy up any background pixels that came over by accident.

Now you can crop, resize etc etc until you’ve got what you want. (Be careful not to upsize too much or you’ll get jagged edges. If you need to increase the size, do so in 10% increments, that should minimize problems with upsizing).

All you need to do now is decide what format to save it in.

gif suports tranparancy but offers very few colors, if the logo is made up only a few primary colors then gif is the obvious choice, it will craete a very small file and be readable most apps. Tiff also supports transparancy and is useful for images with many colors such as photographs, fewer apps support tiff and the file will be larger than gif. My advice would be to try both formats and see how it works out. png may also support transparancy, not sure on that tho.

JP
EB
Ernie_Brigham
Apr 29, 2004
Thanks to you both, at 60 I am still learnig. This type of forum is so helpfull as I can speak in my terms and not computor terms and sombody will understand.
Thanks again

Ernie
JL
Jim_Lloyd
Apr 30, 2004
Here is a link:

< http://www.techtv.com/callforhelp/answerstips/photoshoptips/ story/0,24330,3676641,00.html>

to an interesting way to achieve what you are trying to do. While it may be written for Photoshop, it should work just as well in Elements. I had never seen this method before, but it worked very well. (at least on the TV show with the expert doing it)

By the way, if any of you Elements users have never seen Call for Help on Tech TV, they regularly have Photoshop and Photoshop Elements tips as a feature on the show.

How to Improve Photoshop Performance

Learn how to optimize Photoshop for maximum speed, troubleshoot common issues, and keep your projects organized so that you can work faster than ever before!

Related Discussion Topics

Nice and short text about related topics in discussion sections