I have attached an image of mine for you to all use.
You may use any photo you wish to work with. Remember to NOT save over your original photo! Right click on image and save it where you will be able to find it.
First we want to figure out what in this photo we are going to keep. Let’s keep the adult goose near the waters edge.
You will want to crop your image close around the adult goose so you won’t
end up with a lot of empty space.
Yours should now look like this. To work on the image you may enlarge it.
Now for the fun part:
Click on the little sidebar of your eraser: Click on the “background Eraser”. Move it over your image. You will want the size to be large enough to get the background but not large enough that it takes out your goose either. When using this tool, always remember that the CENTER of the circle is what you wish to place along the EDGE of the goose. Here are the settings I am using but you may use any settings that you wish for your best results.
It may take some practice to get used to using this tool but you will find after learning how to use it you will be using it QUITE a bit. If you make an error, don’t worry, just hit the undo button.
Continue erasing around your goose carefully and your image should now look like this.
This tool comes in VERY handy when wanting to make tubes.
You will want to clean out the rest of the image. Switch back to the regular eraser now as you are done with the background eraser. Size it to a large enough size to take out the majority of the rest of the background as possible. I sized mine at ‘17'.
Continue around your image till all of the background is now white. When all the background is erased, then you will start on the ‘detail work’ of cleaning up around the goose itself. (Colored areas that got missed by the eraser brush.)
Resize your eraser to about a size of 1 or 2. Crop your image again as close to the body as possible. Enlarge the image till you can see the image in pixels, such as the image to the left. In this image you can see that my eraser is ONE pixel in width. This is great for good control when going around the goose image taking out the extra colors that don’t belong, one pixel at a time.
To make sure I get ALL the unwanted pixels I also create another layer and fill this with a solid dark blue. I move it to where it is BEHIND the image I am working on. Now I can see the pixels I need to remove. You can use any color that will allow you to see ALL the missed pixels on your piece. Choose a color that works best for you.
Now that you have gone all over the background to get rid of the unwanted pixels, go to your magic wand. Click anywhere on the background of the layer you are working on. You will now see where you missed some pixels if you did. In my image I missed 6 pixels. This part is time consuming but is well worth the time in the end of having a great image for pasting other places or even as making a tube.
Keep an eye on where your pixel is that you need to erase. Go to edit and remove the magic wand. Now you can erase the pixel. Redo the magic wand and check where else you may need to erase. Repeat removing the wand and re-adding the wand till you get rid of all the extra pixels. Your image should now look like mine when you place the magic wand on this layer.
Your image now should have no extra pixels. You may now delete the background layer. To remove the marching ants in PSP 9, go to ‘select’ then ‘select none’.
Click on ‘image/palette/set palette transparency’. Click on the color block, which is white at this moment. If you wish to use white, I did, then click on OK. To check to see if it is transparent, repeat these steps except this time instead of clicking OK, click on PROOF, then ok. You should now see the checkerboard behind your image.
After all that work we want to save it as a transparency. Make sure your background color is set to white. (ONLY .gif's will save transparencies!)
This image will come back into PSP as a transparency. You may see only a white background but when you go to PROOF, your background will look like a checker board.
For those of you that wish to use the "gif optimizer:
Make sure that your image is already a .gif if you have saved it. If you haven’t saved it that is ok. You will when you go through the gif optimizer. Select EXISTING IMAGE OR LARYER TRANPARENCY then click OK. I tested the result by opening another image, making sure the transparency was clicked, then going back to the image I just optimized, COPIED/PAST AS TRANSPARENCY and it came out just fine.
When opening an image saved through the .gif optimizer, the background will be BLACK.
You may have noticed some of the colors weren’t actually correct on this goose. This is due to the reflection from the water and grass onto the goose. We will cover how to fix this in the next tutorial.
I hope you have enjoyed this lesson! - Kaycy