Mac Instant Alpha

This is Apple's Tip of the Day. Has anyone tried it?

http://tips4mac.blogspot.com/2007/09/removing-background-from-photo.html

Removing the background from a photo!

One of the best new features that came with Keynote '08 is the alpha option that lets you remove an unwanted background from a photo in a second. One of the things that you might have noticed is that you cannot easily copy this effect from Keynote to another app such as Microsoft Office. This wouldn't be a problem if the alpha feature was standard around iLife and iWork, but it is not. There is a workaround however and that is because you can copy and paste it from Keynote to the rest of the iWork suite. To bring the photo that you modified in Keynote into any application, copy it from Keynote, paste it in Pages. You can then copy it back from Pages and paste it into any application without losing the effect that Keynote gave you.

Not sure how this is done--I'm a wiz with background removal (focal point selection) and there is always tinkering no matter how solid the background color is.

As far as after the background is cut out, I've created a one-button-push macro that does the rest. Perhaps that's what this is eluding to--once the background is deleted, and the focal point selected, THEN it takes only a second. *shrugs*

I'd like to see this in action.

Yeah, so far I've filed it under "too good to be true," but that's what I said when I first heard about the iPod.

I'd be leary of anything labeled "instant". There's simply no way a computer can know what pixels you as a human being consider to belong to the subject of a photo and which should be gotten rid of.