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??

You can use the marquee, the lasso, and/or the magic wand tool for that combined with the 'refine edges' tool. Depending on the image you can also use other clever methods, such as described here:

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


Meni.

what would be the best in case of a complicated picture, for example a tree where you see the background between the leaves and branches??

With photographic images, I would not recommend using any of the marquee tools (including the lasso tools) for background removal, ever. It's common for people to think to grab them for this, but it's really not what they're for. Getting decent results from them is extremely time-consuming if your image has even the slightest degree of complexity to it. In most cases, they yield very sloppy results.

Ron, for your tree example, check out this thread, in which I described how to use a channel mask to extract a Christmas tree from its background: /109/f8/207591/1.html Scroll down to post #6.

Channel masking is infinitely faster than marquee-ing (if that's a word) for photographic images, and the results are almost always MUCH better. It's not as immediately obvious of a technique though, which is why most new users (and even some old users) aren't aware of it.

If you're a financially strapped Photoshop user (which could be an oxymoron), the path, pen, and vector based tools are a good way to build up complex clipping paths.

If you have some $$, Mask Pro - http://www.ononesoftware.com/detail.php?prodLine_id=4

This goes beyond the capabilities of Photoshop.

Thanks for the link, Nam. Mask Pro looks pretty cool. I'd heard of it before, but never actually seen it in action. From the tutorial videos, I can't say I'm quite convinced it "goes beyond the capabilities of Photoshop", but it does appear to provide some nice additional/alternative tools. I'm sure the videos are only scratching the surface though, so there's probably a lot more there. I notice it's not terribly expensive either, which is always good.

I'll have to play with the demo when I have some time.

Excellent alternative technique Chosen. I sometimes use this method...but like you said, even us veterans stick to marquee selection--this is how we learned and mastered alpha creation. Your posted method, however, is much easier and more effective, and I believe all graphic artists should become familiar and proficient in this lesser-known technique.

Good call. Thanks for reminding me.