Leaded Window help please

I am trying to make a leaded window, I have one, and I am choosing the majic wand to select the window and leads, and I have it on a transparent background, and I use the flaming pear for the alpha. It looks good on photshop but when I bring it into sl, the edges of the leaded panes are not very crisp looking a bit faded on the edges.

Is there a better way of selecting the pixels for this method. Thanks, I petty new to photoshop not had it long CS3

Okay, If I want a closer cut I use "Select > Color Range" then select the area which you would like to be cut out, then you can make it more or less intense. I could have explained it easier if I wasn't on my laggy laptop but I'm sure you will work it out.

A couple things:

First, never, ever, ever, EVER use the magic wand. While it can easily seem like the obvious choice for this sort of thing, in reality it's arguably the worst tool in the history of tools. I really wish they'd do away with it, and eliminate this kind of confusion altogether. It's clunky, clumsy, and extremely underpowered, not a good combination of traits.

There are about a thousand better ways to form selections. The one Tristen mentioned, Select -> Color Range, is probably a good one for your purposes. But it's hard to say for sure without seeing the image you're working with, or at the very least, having a more fleshed out description of it. Other good options are channel masks, quick masks, marquees, and vectors. If you need help learning how to use any of them, ask away.


Second, when you say "the flaming pear", what exactly do you mean? Flaming Pear is a software company who makes dozens of plugins for Photoshop. Their Solidify filter is commonly employed as a means of preventing halos in alpha-channeled imagery. Is that what you meant? Or was it something else? They've got a great many products that conceivably could be useful for creating a leaded glass window.

Thank you for input on the magic Wand Chosen much appreciate. Yes the flaming pear is the solidify I was using to get rid of the white halo. I've tried upload the image so you can see it, but for some reason I cannot do it? Browse opens and I can choose it but will not upload, and yet it is jpg image.

I will have a go at the colour range and try that.

The forum upload thingy is spotty at best. If you want to show the image, put it on the Web somewhere (imageshack, picoodle, your own website, whatever), and then put the URL here. If you put the URL between IMG tags, the image will display directly in the forum. Without the tags, the text of the address will display. Either way, we'll be able to take a look at the image.

I've never used imageshack before I hope this works.

That's an easy one. Use a channel mask. This will take you about three seconds, once you know how to do it. The first time through, it might be a couple minutes, since you'll be reading while doing. Here's what to do:

1. Go the Channels palette in Photoshop, and look at each channel individually. Pick the one that appears to have the most contrast. In this case, it's the blue channel.



2. Duplicate the blue channel by dragging it onto the Make New Channel button at the bottom right of the palette. You'll now have a new channel called Blue Copy. This will become your alpha channel in a minute.

3. I assume you're going to want the woodwork and leading to be opaque, and the glass to be transparent. Right now, we're almost opposite of that. The glass is nearly white, and everything else is nearly black. So, simply invert. With Blue Copy, and ONLY Blue Copy activated (name highlighted in the palette), click Image -> Adjustements -> Invert, or just press ctrl-I.



Notice it's already starting to look like a proper alpha.

4. We're almost there, but not quite. Our whites aren't pure white yet, and our blacks aren't pure black. We need to adjust the levels. Again, with Blue Copy, and ONLY Blue Copy activated, now click Image -> Adjustments -> Levels, or press ctrl-L.

In the Levels dialog, you'll see a histogram for the input levels, and a gradient bar for the output levels. Adjust only the inputs. Leave the outputs alone. You'll find that for this particular image, if you raise the black slider to about 77, and lower the white slider to about 167, you'll end up with a pretty good black & white.



5. Now just grab a white paintbrush, and paint over the few stray black spots that didn't get leveled out. Assuming you want the glass to be fully transparent, your alpha is now done.



If you want the glass to be translucent instead of transparent, open up the Levels dialog again, go to the output levels, and raise the black slider. The further you raise it, it the lighter the blacks will become.

Alternatively, you could just flood the black areas with a gray paint bucket, of course. The levels adjustment is just a bit quicker, and has less margin for error.

6. If you need to extract the woodwork/leading from the rest of the image, ctrl-click on the alpha channel you just created, to form a selection from it, then click on the layer that has the whole window on it, and either apply the selection as a layer mask, or use it to jump a copy to a new layer (ctrl-J).

7. If you want to apply the Solidify filter, go ahead. Otherwise, kust put a dark brown layer behind the woodwork/leadwork, and it will be close enough that you shouldn't see any haloing.


Note, the diagonals on mine are a little jagged, probably because I'm working from the JPEG you posted, rather than a good, lossless source image. If you experience similar results with yours, you might want to apply a very slight Gaussian blur to the alpha channel, just to soften it up a little.

Also, this probably goes without saying, but you should crop the image, to get rid of the empty space around the window frame, and you should resize it to powers of two.


EDIT: I just noticed I was a little sloppy painting over the black specs. I missed a few. Do a better job with yours.

Thank you ever so much Chosen that worked absolutely brilliantly. And is that a true alpha texture now by doing it that way.

I've uploaded it to sl looks ok.

Thank you for your help Chosen much appreciated.

You're most welcome for the help. I'm glad you've got it working now.

Let me address one comment you made:



I'm not sure what you mean by "true alpha texture". If it's got four channels, then the fourth one is an alpha channel. Hence, it's an alpha texture. I'm not sure what an "untrue" alpha texture might be.

So you know, in the typical default standard for interpreting RGBA imagery, channel 1 controls redness, channel 2 controls greenness, channel 3 controls blueness, and channel 4 controls opacity. The individual names of the channels are arbitrary. You could rename Red to Purple Polkadots, and it would still control redness, as long as it's in the channel 1 slot. The transparency channel, likewise, doesn't have to be named Alpha 1. It just has to be channel number 4. Calling it Blue Copy, or any other name, doesn't change anything at all.

Thank you once again Chosen, cleared up a lot of answers for me, i understand it a little more now. Once again much appreciated.