Masking Magic
If your image has a solid color background, the easiest way to remove it is by using your image editor's "magic wand" tool to quickly select the background and delete it. By clicking on the background color with your magic wand tool, you are able to easily select all the adjacent pixels within the same color similarity. If you have additional, non-adjacent areas, you will need to use the magic wand tool again in additive mode to add to the selection. Consult your software help file for the specifics on how to do this.If your image has a background that is not solid, the process is a bit more complicated since you will have to manually mask the area to be removed. Once you have the area masked you can either delete the masked area, or invert your mask and copy the object from the selection. Visit the following links to learn more about masks and for specific masking tools and techniques:
- All About Grayscale Masks
- Removing Backgrounds with Photoshop
- Masks in Paint Shop Pro
- Masks in Corel Photo-Paint
- Eliminate White and Eliminate Black Filters
For images with very complex backgrounds, there is software specifically designed for making these difficult selections and dropping out the background.
Once you have isolated the object, you can save it as a transparent GIF or PNG and use the image in any program that supports the chosen format. But what if your program doesn't support these formats?
Dropout Color and Color Masks
Many programs have the internal ability to dropout, or mask, a single color in an image. For instance, Microsoft Publisher's wrap text to picture command will automatically drop out the white pixels in an image. With CorelDRAW's bitmap color mask tool, you can choose colors to be removed from an image. This provides a little more flexibility since you can specify more than one color, control the tolerance level of the masked color, and it works for images that have a background color other than white. There may be other software with this functionality; consult your documentation to find out.There are some drawbacks to these methods, however. The first is that these functions will only work within that particular program. You generally can't drop out a color in CorelDRAW, paste the image into another program, and have the transparent areas remain. The other drawback is that the dropout tool works in such a way that it drops out all instances of that particular color and there may be instances of that color in parts of the image other that the background. This results in unsightly "holes" in your image.
When dropout and color masking don't work for your image, another option you might be able to use is called a slice, trim, clip, or mask. This is done by drawing a vector shape, and using the vector outline to cut, or mask, the bitmap image.
If you've exhausted all the options above, and you still haven't achieved the desired results, it's time to take a look at what can be done with your software's pen tool and clipping paths.
Once you have a transparent image, you'll probably want to do something with it. This next article explains how to handle the most common scenarios.
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