removing the background of a picture

I have made some clothes with pictures on them.
All pictures however have a background, no matter what colour.........

From some pictures i removed the background using the magnetic lasso in Photoshop.
This works, but in some cases it leaves a small piece of the background at the pictures surrounding. And some pics are too complex to remove the background using the magnetic lasso.

Is there another way to delete the background of a picture and thus make it transparent??

Hi Ron!

The quickest way (if I'm understanding you correctly) would be to use a Layer Mask to cover/remove the background that you don't want (that's the square icon with the circle in the middle of it...3rd from the left if you aren't familiar with it).

You can post this in the Textures forum a little ways down there and you'll get a plethora of advice, info and suggestions on how to use Photoshop.

Best,
~Ari

I need to this at times for my work... and I use Photoshop for it.

I always zoom rather far into the picture and the pen tool to create a path. After the path is made and saved I selected the content with in the path to a new picture with a transparant background. But for a good result you have to work very precise.

Morwen.

Would be to build a simple 2 prim modeling wall. I did this to model my shapes...I attached 2 wide flat prims and now I can set my AV against any back drop I choose by changing the color/texture of the wall....if I want no background I simply make my modeling wall white. It works like a charm and there's no fussing with photoshop to eliminate unwanted 'stuff'.

Next time please ask this kind of question in Texturing Tips.

Have you turned anti-aliasing off, and increase the tolerance? If you have a high contrast background then you should find that gives a better solution.

I don't EVER use anything but the magic wand.

BEST method for me (that I use every single day) is this:

Chose a color that will contrast with your object. I normally choose white because I never rly use white. Next, I build a room completely white on full bright, then I go up to the client menu and do two things. I turn off the rendering of particles and I turn off the rendering of foot shadows. The reason I turn off the rendering of particles is so that I can put a prim out in front of me and keep it in edit mode so my eyes don't flop around and I don't have to see the particles coming out of my hand.
Anyways...take all your pictures...then open them in photoshop. Cut out the main area you want to use of each photograph and paste it to a new ad .psd for compiling together later. Once you have everything you need for your ad opened on your ad .psd, open the magic wand tool. Before you use it, if you've never observed before, take a look at the top of the screen and see where it says tolerance and the number beside it. Just keep that area in mind.
Then I click on each of the pasted photos in the white area. I zoom in really good to see how it's going to cut the excess of my picture. If the white it is going to cut bleeds into my avatar or object, I can simply go up to the tolerance number and change it to reflect my desired result. If I want to make the magic wand really picky about what white it will select, I will turn the tolerance down to a low number. This is useful if maybe you keep getting your hair in the selection. In this case I just turn the tolerance to about 5 and select away. It seems to be best if you can't completely remove the background color around areas like the hair to cut anyway, leaving some white around the hair and to go back with a blur brush and just lightly blur that white area away. Another lil trick is for the background color of your new ad to be the same as in the ads you took in world. I always use white background, so even if I'm in a hurry and don't wanna take the time to cut my subjects out well, it won't show up at all.
I'm not very good at explaining things out and I just woke up, but I hope I explained my workflow in a way that one can understand.

Simple technique - Blue Screen.

Make a floor and a back wall that are asolid color that does NOT appear in the avatar or their clothes. For example, if they are a red-furred fox wearing a yellow dredd and a green har, you could use a bright blue backdrop. Make the floor and backfrop prims fullbright.

Take your pic against this backdrop. Export to your computer.

In Photoshop:

Open the file.

Duplicate the layer, so it isn't the locked default "background" layer, and delete the original layer.

"Select contiguous" to remove most of the background

Use the eyedropper to select the color of any remaining color fringe bits, and select color range to highlight and remove the rest of the blue.

You now have your figure isolated on a transparent background.

Of course, if you wanted a white or other solid color backdrop behind them in the first place, no need to do the editing to eliminate the blue. Just take the pic with fullbright prims of the appropriate color behind the figure.

Learn it, live it, love it.

http://www.design.iastate.edu/LABS/tutorials/photoshop/ps0002.html

You can always select the picture you want then invert the selection and cut that.

Anytime I have made a background of something transparent/alpha in Photoshop, I have used the background eraser tool. You can select it by right clicking it on the eraser tool. It shows you that what you are erasing will be transparent by making that area appear as a checkered white and gray area. You may have to zoom in and use various sizes of this tool.

I think some of you misunderstood the question a bit; it is not about making an avatar pic in SL or so, but a picture for example downloaded from internet of a scanned RL-picture or whatever.

If i have for example a picture showing a drawing of a dog against a white background. Maybe i want to put that dog on a black t-shirt WITHOUT the white background .....

What is the best way to 'cut' the dog out of its background??

There's a thread in the texturing forum about exactly this subject: /109/48/171200/1.html#post1648651
It's about PSP, but i'm sure a similar thing works for Photoshop as well. As long as you have a basic understanding of producing a transparency in an alpha channel you should be okay. Otherwise check out the stickies in the texturing forums.
Good luck

A cool way of removing backgrounds, is a function in Paint Shop Pro.... it has a fat (adjustable) felt tip which you trace around the outline of the part you wish to keep, overlapping the background elements and they magically disappear leaving you with a clear, transparent background.
The product was bought by Corel.. I found the link for the tool here [url="http://campratty.com/4tooltours/kz/bge1.html

Doesn't work with my version of PS (CS) which does not seem to export this to a GIF89a file

Simplest method if the background is solid:

1. Magic Wand the background color--setting the feather or tolerance of the selection is something you want to tool around with--the higher the number, the wider the range of color similar to the pixel you selected will be selected. After you've made your initial selection (sometimes you can click again on an area, and it will widen the selection), you will want to make small tweaks around your foreground object. In some circumstances, you will have to trace the edge of the center piece with add or subtract marque selection until you're happy with the end result. After you're done, hit delete. Then Selection > Invert. Then Copy. Now you have your main object in your clipboard for whatever you want to do with it.

2. Alternate Method: using Selection > Select by Color Range. Once this tool is active, select a color pixel in your image that is closest to the color you want to eliminate. Fool around with the 'fuzzy' setting...or whatever it's called. Sometimes this works well...other times the magic wand is just as easy.

Simplest method if the background is chaotic:


1. Trace around your main focal-point very carefully. Once this is done, follow the rest of the steps from the above explanation--of course, do not invert if you've actually started with the object you want to keep. A hassle, yes, but a necessary evil.


*That is why it is always good to prep your work with the future in mind. If you are taking photos in SL, and want to do some post-Fx work, it's best to set up a solid color background prior to the photoshoot. This way you can exclude the background in PS a lot easier.

After making your selection:

Layer -> Matting -> Defringe

TY for the tip Hok! Works for me )
.

Michael, you have supplied a very detailed walk through of the technique, but labelling that 'Simple Method', is perhaps a little ambitous.

I used the Paint Shop Pro background extractor function, and it works perfectly, even on fine hair mixed up in a chaotic backgroud photograph. That, I would call simple.
[url="http://campratty.com/4tooltours/kz/bge1.html
Incredibly useful tool for beginer and expert alike. See the photo results on pages 6 and 7.