Greetings, cats and kittens! LOL Today I bring more goodies.
The first one is in the form of a tip. I am one who is constantly adapting web images into my art or as an element in a scrap kit. The art of ‘extraction’ is just that – an art. Some things are easy. A dark-colored ball on a stark-white background, for instance, can be extracted in several ways, each serving it’s purpose. But, there are some images which are difficult. Anything with alot of little spaces, like between leaves on a tree, that allow the background to still show through, is a bear! It is virtually impossible to go in and delete, or clean up, the background in all of the tiny little spaces.
Ever on the lookout for a better method, I even downloaded a filter that does this for you in Photoshop. It works pretty good. But, in my opinion, still lacking. Sometimes I wish I could just go in a remove every pixel of the background color. Well, guess what?! I found a way to do this!
In today’s class, “6-Month Photoshop Course”, at CreativeTechs.com, one of the things covered was using the ‘Save for Web & Devices’ feature, under the ‘File’ menu, in Photoshop. (I use CS3. Hopefully, this is the same for many of the currently popular versions.) By going in to this feature, you are able to remove selected colors from an image with such ease, my jaw dropped.
I’m using a black and white image with scrollwork, normally very hard to extract.
In Photoshop: Click on ‘File’. Click on ‘Save for Web & Devices’. For this image, or any image, there are two setting to look for, ‘PNG-8’ and ‘GIF’. Both of them allow for ‘Transparency’ to be used. I’ve circled in purple where this choice is located. I used ‘GIF’, but, chose between the two to decide which you like best. You can reduce the number of colors down to a lesser number with the selector next to this (cirlced in red). Fiddle around with the features and see what you like.
If you look further down the panel, you see the actual color palette for the image. At the bottom of the color palette is a button, ‘Maps selected colors to transparency’. Highlight the color you want to remove, or make transparent (top circle), then, click on the featured button.(bottom circle).
This is what I get with just the white removed.
And, if you noticed the ‘color palette’ window, the whites that I clicked appear like this. This means they are transparent.
When you are satisfied, click ‘Save’. When I click ‘Done’, it just takes me back to my un-edited image. Once saved, obviously, you have to open it back up to work on it further, but, there ya go! Yet, one more way, to do an extraction in Photoshop.
(I used color behind it for the transparency to show.)
One word of note. When you re-open your image you will find the colors were saved as ‘Indexed’. If you try to do anything with the image you’ll get that obnoxious noise. LOL All you have to do is go to ‘Image’>’Mode’, and click on ‘RGB Color’. Easy as that!
If you managed to sit through all that, then, you deserve a little sunshine in your life. LOL Introducing, my newest endeavor, “Sunny Morning”. This was made for the Magickal Scraps March Color Challenge in their forum. When I saw the color palette, I naturally went with a garden theme. Then, as I collected and came up with various ideas, I thought about how hard it is to grow anything in my garden. It’s hard enough to figure out location to plant things so that they get the correct amount of sun. It’s even harder trying to get the feeding and watering down. Plants definitely get put through their paces with me. LOL But, the biggest threat that I know of to any plant is other living things, like kids and pests. Children playing, pets doing their thing, and all the multitude of pests that can affect plants, brought me to my idea for this kit. I hope you enjoy all the ‘dangers’ of the garden.
(Click on each of the images to go to MediaFire for download)
That’s it for now. I hope to see you soon!
Su
a free spirit 
Thank you for freebies. Link on your post was added to Lori's freebie list
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XXX Thanxxx Dearest One for these beautiful Inspirations shared XXXBlessings and Love to You All for a wondrous weekend XXX
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Thank you so much for this Freebie. I want to let you know that I posted a link to your blog in CBH Digital Scrapbooking Freebies, under the Page 3 post on Mar. 19, 2010. Thanks again.
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Thank you so much for this Freebie. I want to let you know that I posted a link to your blog in CBH Digital Scrapbooking Freebies, under the Page 1 post on Mar. 19, 2010. Thanks again.
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Just a quick note to let you know that a link to this post will be placed on CraftCrave.com in the DigiFree category today [19 Mar 01:26pm GMT]. Thanks, Maria
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thanks so much. going to see if it works in photo elements also.
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Thank you so much for this post. I want to let you know that I posted a link to your blog in CBH Digital Scrapbooking Freebies, under the Page 5 post on Mar. 23, 2010. Thanks again.
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Wow this is a WAY cool tutorial! I am going to have to try it. I've been doing it totally different than this. I did however find a way to remove extra pixel dirt from the images. If you do a stroke on the image and then *load selection* then select invert and hit delete a few times, it takes away all of the fuzzy grainy stuff. I'm definitely going to have to try your tut. May save me HOURS of time! 🙂
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