Trim a JPEG and place it on transparent background

aquaholik wrote on 6/29/2011, 9:10 AM

How do I trim say a picture of a leaf/heart into just a leaf/heart and place it on a transparent background so that I can use that in my project(say to cover a body part)? i.e instead of text on transparent background, how do create other shapes?

I was able to mask a clip and made it fit on a "thinking" clip art, but how would I go about masking picture of a leaf so that only the leaf(and not the background that the leaf is on) would show up?

Comments

jetdv wrote on 6/29/2011, 9:18 AM

In your paint program, make the unwanted area "transparent". Then save in a format that saves tranparency information such as PNG.

aquaholik wrote on 6/29/2011, 10:04 AM

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction. Now I have to Google up and see how it is done or can it be done using Photoshop elements 8.

Got it. I was able to lasso and copy it and placed it on a transparent background using PSE 8, and use keyframe and pan/crop to follow a moving subject in a clip in VMS 11.

richard-amirault wrote on 6/29/2011, 11:20 AM

It's also possible, in some circumstances, to use the "background eraser" tool instead. Sometimes one method will give better results over the other.

Also, when cutting out part of an image it is often good to "feather" the cut to help hide any mistakes (and it looks better in the final, combined image too)

aquaholik wrote on 6/29/2011, 1:12 PM

I just tried the background eraser method and it is SO much easier. Very easy to do when the background is on a white background like most clip arts are. Thanks for the tip.