Crop and/or Trimming question, please

[LoneWolf1038]

Hi,

This is my first post to the forum. I am pretty new to Photoshop, but have managed to learn alot from reading the posts. I experiment ALOT and find it fun.

I have a problem with cropping. Here's the situation. I am doing a label for a wedding CD that has two picture on it. No matter HOW I do it, the white corners of one of the picture overlaps onto the other picture. I tried the send to back/send to front but I always have a white corner from the other picture.

I want to know how to crop the corner off a picture. Actually, I would really like to cut the people's bodies and keep them without all the white around them. I can't use the "normal" cropping tool because the people are not at the same level in the picture.

I tried making the background transparent, but it still shows up on the CD label as a white rectangle.

I'm pressed for time getting this done, so if someone could please tell me how to do it, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks in advance for any and all help!

[tombothetominator]

Hmmm... posting the images might help.
Also - are you printing directly from photoshop to the cover, or are you going through other software as well??

[LoneWolf1038]

Hmmm... posting the images might help.
Also - are you printing directly from photoshop to the cover, or are you going through other software as well??

Thanks for answering so quickly Tombo. I don't know how to attach the photo. The man is standing and the woman is MUCH shorter. To use the convention crop tool to get rid of the white (especially in the upper left) would take the man's head off also.

[LoneWolf1038]

Hmmm... posting the images might help.
Also - are you printing directly from photoshop to the cover, or are you going through other software as well??

Also forgot to mention that I am editing the picture in PS and then using Acoustica CD/DVD Label maker to lay it out on the CD.

[tombothetominator]

best place to host images for quick and easy is: www.imageshack.us

As far as the image: A lot of how the finished product looks is going to depend on the acoustica program that you are using, and how it deals with transparencies.

There are a multitude of ways that you can cut the people out of the picture, including:
using the pen tool which is my favorite ( http://www.melissaclifton.com/tutorial-pentool.html)
using the eraser tool to erase their background.
using the lasso tool to make rough cuts around them
using the marquee tools to delete selections.

But the problem is you end up with a portion that you need to be transparent. When you save the file, most of those file types are going to to change all that transparent space to white space (which you said was looking pretty ugly on the CDs??).


So, I downloaded the acoustica program to see what it says and if you go into the help file and type transparent images, it tells you that you can check an option called 'top left pixel is transparent color'.

So what would make sense to me would be to cover all the space that you want to be transparent on the cd label some odd color that isn't anywhere else in the image (bright magenta, or teal generally work pretty well). Then, anywhere where acoustica finds that color it wont print the information.

So what you could also do in PS is to add a layer on top of everything else, and use a brush with the ugly-bright color and brush over everything (especially the top - left corner) but the bride and groom . Then save this as a .jpg, and import it into acoustica, check the box for transparent color, and you should be good to go.

I hope this makes sense??

[tombothetominator]

Edit: just tried it and it seems to work pretty well. The program pops up some stupid warning that since it is a jpg file the compression may cause unexpected results, but it seemed to work fine for most of the pictures i put in there. You could save it as a .tiff file and probably get slightly better results.

[LoneWolf1038]

Edit: just tried it and it seems to work pretty well. The program pops up some stupid warning that since it is a jpg file the compression may cause unexpected results, but it seemed to work fine for most of the pictures i put in there. You could save it as a .tiff file and probably get slightly better results.

Thanks Tombo! You're a life saver! I did as you said....and it works like a charm! You are right that the TIFF file has better results than the JPEG file did.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

[tombothetominator]

No problemo. Glad to be of help.