the white edge on photoshop paintbrush

hi, I have been trying for weeks solving this problem.
When I try to use the paintbrush to draw lines, and use the magicwand to select the area, it will always pick the area away from the paintbruch and select some white area too... which means that all of my clothings has a white edge along the item... would someone please teach me how to make the edge "AS IS" so then the silly select wand will PICK the area EXACTLY to the line instead of leaving space for the white edge please?

this is driving me insane...

chinadoll...

I've said it before.. stop double cutting.

Don't make stuff on white and expect to be able to "select" it without getting the white included.

Here are the steps in photoshop 7

1. open a new document. Choose contents "transparent"

2. draw on transparent layer

3. save as a 32 bit targa

4. upload.. and enjoy!

As far as picking things better it just sounds like you need to take a class in Photoshop. A good book to get is "Adobe Photoshop Classroom in a Book"

This is VERY common, and it's easy to fix. There are two possible things going on here. The first could be that your feathering settings for your selection tools are too high. Make sure feathering is set to zero pixels.

The second (more likely) explanation has to do with the way Photoshop handles anti-aliasing and transparency. More than likely, you've got anti-aliasing turned on for your painting tools, as you should. This serves to prevent the appearance of jagged edges by combining colors along diagonal or curved lines and borders. Anti-aliasing will help blend foreground images with the background so that the elements of your image appear homogenoeous, not just pasted together. The pixels at the edges of your foreground elements are combined with the color of the background.

What's happening when you use your magic wand as you described, is you're selecting areas of similar color, and that includes those anti-aliased edge pixels. Even though they've had their color altered a bit by anti-aliasing, they'll still get picked up by the magic wand most of the time since their color is still similar enough to the original. If the background those pixels were next to happened to be a light color like white, or transparent, they'll end up being very light themselves. Remove the background, and those lightned pixels often end up appearing as a whitish halo around the image.

The solution is incredibly simple. Just use a dark background instead of a light one. If the background is the same color as the main color of the image or darker, you'll never see that halo. The anti-aliasing will server to darken the edge pixels instead of to lighten them. Technically, you'll end up with a dark halo instead of a light one, but dark ones are pretty much always undetectable in SL.



P.S. A more complex solution is to place a copy of the image on a layer beneath it and blur the copy several times so that the colors end up bleeding beyond the borders of the image. This works really well to eliminate the halo effect altogether, but for SL purposes it's kind of procedural overkill since, as I said, SL tends not to display dark halos very prominently if at all. Generally speaking, a simple black background will suffice just fine.

I am sorry, I have no idea what dark background instead of a light one means.
If I use the same color (background and the straps of the clothes), the magic wand will not be able to pick up the lines at all and select everything as a big square. I really do not understand how to do this... Is it possible to give me a step by step example to create a single line (not a fancy dress or anything), yes just a straight line with paintbrush and use magicwand to pick, and select it without the white edges.

Thank you.

Using the magic wand is probably the worst way to make a selection in photoshop, I recommend you get to know how to create selections by using masks, paths and alpha channels, here are some links to some simple examples which might help explain better then I ever could here ...

Selection Tutorials

If you are new to photoshop try searching the web for "photoshop tutorial" there is a wealth of excellent help out there

China, it sounds like you are brand new to Photoshop. If that's the case, then I'd highly recommend following the tutorials in the help files so you can learn the basics. Also, as others have pointed out, there are literally thousands and thousands of PS tutorials all over the web, and there are some great books out there.

To answer your question about what a dark background means, I assume you've noticed that when you first create a new Photoshop image, you're looking at a blank white canvas. Simply paint it black with the paint bucket. Now you've got a black background. Create a new layer, and work on top of it. Leave the black layer on the bottom so that it will always be the background. If you don't know what layers are or how to create them, look it up in the Photoshop help file. Layers are perhaps Photoshop's most basic and most powerful feature, and if you haven't been using them, then that's 99% of the reason you've been struggling.


As long as the clothing is on a seperate layer from the background, you'll be able to select it seperately, regardless of whether or not the background layer and the clothing layer happen to have colors in common. Just make sure "Use All Layers" is unchecked for your selection tools.

For what it's worth, I agree with Laukosargas that the magic wand is one of the worst tools in Photoshop, but it is also one of the simplest, and it's not uncommon at all for those new to Photoshop to rely on it heavily in the beginning. I would recommend following Laukosargas's suggestion of learning to use the more powerful selection tools that are available in Photoshop, but I would wait until you've learned some more basic functions first.



Here's my standard tutorial for making a bikini top. It's not the "straight line" example you asked for, but it's close enough. Although the example in the tutorial is a bikini top, no information is given about how to actually paint it. You will learn how to properly extract it, how to properly create an alpha channel for transparency in SL, how to give it the proper background to eliminate the white halo, etc, but actually painting it is up to you. If you'd rather use a line instead of a bikini top shape, you can certainly do so. The steps will be the same.

I've pasted this tutorial into many threads on this forum, and just about everyone has found it helpful. My girlfriend was able to follow it, and she'd never previously used Photoshop in her life.

Not that the tutorial is for all versions of Photoshop other than 7.0. If you're using 7.0, update to 7.01. The update is a free download from adobe.com.


How to Create an Alpha Channel in Photoshop
Let's stick with the example of a bikini top.

1. On the Layers Palette turn off all layers except for the layer that has your bikini on it. (To turn a layer off, click the eyeball symbol to the left of its name.)

2. If the bikini layer has any white space around the bikini itself, use the eraser to get rid of the white space. It's very important at this stage that the bikini be on its own layer with nothing else on it.

3. On the Layers Palette, ctrl-click the thumbnail for the layer with the bikini on it. (The thumbnail is the little picture of the layer directly to the left of the layer's name.) This will select everything on the layer. You should see the "marching ants" outlining your bikini now.

4. On the Layers Palette, click the tab that says Channels to switch it to the Channels Palette. What you should see listed here are the three primary channels for your image, labled, "Red", "Green", & "Blue", and a master channel for the three, labelled "RGB". If you see any other channels besides those four, delete them now.

5. In the lower right corner of the Palette Window, locate the button that looks like a square sticker being peeled from its backing. It's the second one from the right. It's immediately to the left of the one that looks like a trash can. It says "New Channel" when you hover your mouse over it. Click it.

6. You should now see a new layer called "Alpha 1", which is currently all black. Make sure all channels except for Alpha 1 are turned off and that Alpha 1 is turned on. This should have happened automatically when you created Alpha 1, but if it didn't, do it now.

7. Your canvas should now appear to be solid black with the exception that you should still be able to see the "marching ants" outline of your bikini. Paint everything inside the outline white and leave everything outside of it black.

8. Click "Select" on the menu bar at the top of the screen to pull down the Select Menu. Click "Deselect" and you should see the marching ants disappear.

9. On the Channels Palette, trun the red, green, & blue channels back on, and turn Alpha 1 off. Now click the tab that says layers to switch back to the Layers Palette. Create a new layer by pressing the same button you previously used to create the new channel. (Just as it created a new channel while you were on the Channels Palette, it will create a new layer while you're on the Layers Palette.) Click on the name of this new layer and drag it underneath the layer with the bikini on it. Paint the new layer 50% gray or darker; black is fine. (The gray/black layer will prevent the white halo sometimes caused when Alphas are created the way we just did it. If you don't know what I mean by that, don't worry about. Just make sure to always put a gray/black layer underneath your work and you'll never have to see that white halo.)

10. Save your file as a 32-bit TGA and upload it to SL.

Hi Chinadoll

One of the problems with photoshop is that there are 10 ways to do any given thing and each of us has developed our own personal favorites. This doesn't make it easier for you to follow us all I'm sorry to say...lol. Combining the numerous ways to select something is also common.

My own personal favorite selection method is Quickmask because you can literally paint in your selection. A Quick Mask tutorial can be seen here:

http://www.speedeenet.com/~dey/quick_mask_in_photoshop.htm

If it would help you, try IMing me in world and I will be glad to talk to you about the various ways to do the selection process and inserting a darker layer underneath.

Robin Sojourner has posted a link to a good tutorial on alphas and the white halo all done in an informative quicktime movie. http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLPages/SLTranspStart.html

Incidently she uses the magic wand tool in her tutorial hehe. Wisper is right though there's about 10 ways to do the same thing and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. My personal favorite is path to selection.

Hey I have a quick question about #9. Once I make the new background layer what exactly do I do with it? I assume I make it before I flatten so does it get merged before I flatten? This is where most of the tutorials leave me hanging. I have this dark background layer but now I don't know what to do with it lol. Also on at least one occasion I wasn't able to drag a layer below my main layer, never did figure that out. I'm using PS CS. Thanks!!!

Thanks for the question, Jana. The answer of what to do with it is simply to put it on the bottom and leave it there. Its only purpose is to cause the anti-aliased pixels at the edge of the alpha selection to become darkened instead of lightened as they are blended against the background. With a light or transparent backgroud, you get lightned piexels at the edges, which stand out like a sore thumb in SL. Whith a dark background, you get darkened pixels at the edges, which are more or less undetectable in SL.

As for your question about flattening, that's a completely unnecessary step. In fact, I strongly recommend against it. In PS, when you save as TGA, an inherently flat format, the program will prompt you that the save will be a copy, which is exactly what you want. Your original layered working document will remain intact, and I recommend saving that as a PSD to preserve the layers in case you want to make any changes later. If you flatten it, you'll have to start again from scratch if you want to make any major changes.

So, the bottom line is just follow the tutorial step by step, exactly as it's written, and it will work just fine. Adding extra steps (like flattening) is unnecessary, and can cause confusion, as you've experienced.

Oh, and by the way, the time you couldn't drag your new layer to the bottom was likely because you already had Background Layer in place. This is something Photoshop does automatically by default. The Background Layer is locked, and remains fixed to the bottom of the layer stack, so nothing can be moved below it. To get around this, either delete the background layer before you begin your work, or else double click on its name to change it to a normal layer. If you do the latter (which can be done at any time), you'll then be able to move it, rename it, etc., just like any other layer.

If you have any other questions, let me know.

Chosen, I love you!!!! You know you got me thru learning alpha channels in the first place when nothing else made sense. And now you solved my dilemma about why i could never go back and modify something - all because i was flattening!!! YOU ROCK!!!!!!!!!

I have a stupid question, or no doubt it's going to come out that way.. I'm using Adobe PS 7, and I was following the great quicktime tutorial by Robin about alpha channels, etc. and I've gotten all that done to my satisfaction on the image I'm putting the channel on..but..

when it comes to saving it as a TGA as indicated in the tuturials, it doesn't give me the option in the save to check the boxes for alpha channels and layers, like it does in the tutorial, and like I would expect.. don't know anyone knows why this is ,and why it's only letting me get the save as copy option.. thanks.

Aurora, download the free Photoshop 7.0.1 Update from Adobe, and you'll be all set. PS 7.0 saves Targa files differently than all other versions. The update fixes that, among a few other things.

Ah, great, thanks. =) That worked.