Here’s a few simple steps to achieve a background knockout on an image in which the background is a solid color. Photoshop offers plenty of ways to achieve this same affect through various Toolbar tools and Layer Masking techniques. Each technique is most advantageous depending on the
Read more →Another powerful selection tool is the Quick Mask. It’s on the main ‘Toolbar’ as I have captured below. Set the ‘Foreground/Background’ color to ‘Black/White’ (D key) and then hit the ‘Quick Mask’ button to enable it. Also note the color of the active layer when in ‘Quick
Read more →This method is a straight forward method and involves the ‘Background Eraser Tool (E)’ . This tool finds the edges of an object but instead of selecting the object, they remove pixels outside of it. This tool works best when theres more than one color in the
Read more →First select the ‘Pen Tool (P)’ from the ‘Toolbar’. Then up on the ‘Options Bar’ choose the ‘Paths’ option. Then with the ‘Pen Tool’ still selected trace the area that you want to mask (ie. protect), in this case its the entire building. As you can see
Read more →Here’s a few simple steps to achieve another method of eliminating the background of an image when exporting the image to a page layout, vector-editing application, or printing purposes. We will create a ‘Clipping Path’ to isolate the nontransparent portion of an image so that layout programs
Read more →Select the target layer in the Layers Palette and choose’ Alt+Ctrl+X’ (Mac: Option+Command+X)(‘Filter/Extract’) to open the ‘Extract Filter Tool’. Using the default settings, except for brush size, I simply selected the ‘Edge Highlighter Tool (B)’ and painted along the edge of the building from left to right.
Read more →Select the target layer in the Layers Palette and choose’ Alt+Ctrl+X’ (Mac: Option+Command+X)(‘Filter/Extract’) to open the ‘Extract Filter Tool’. The same applies here as with the ‘Default Settings’ exercise, except, I used the ‘Edge Highlighter Tool (B)’ and painted along the edge of the building from left
Read more →This tool finds pixels of similar value and automatically erases them to transparency on the active layer . This tool also works best when theres a solid color in the background to be removed. Experimentation with the ‘Tolerance’ level will ensure best results. As with the ‘Background
Read more →There’s a variety of ways of applying a ‘Layer Mask’ to achieve the knockout effect. (I’ll just show the most flexible example) The most flexible option is the combination of applying the ‘Pen Tool (P)’ to add anchors points and in combination with the ‘Convert Anchor Point
Read more →Transparencies to Indexed images Here’s a powerful trick to quickly add transparency to an indexed composite using features in the ‘Save for Web’ Control Panel. Below is a simple index (.gif) image I loaded into Photoshop. Instantly, you should notice that the image is locked. To provide
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