[FrankL]

I am pulling my hair out trying to do what I think must be one of the most basic tasks in Photoshop. Trying to remove a background.

This is the scenario: I have a circular image with a plain white background. Using the magic wand I select the background and delete it (Select/Inverse, then Delete). The grey/white checked background results.

I save as a TIF file and then load the image into another application.

Result: A circular image WITH A WHITE SQUARE BACKGROUND!

Any help gratefully received. Thanks.

[webmaster]

Hi and welcome to DEVPPL.

If I've got it right, you want a circle with a transparent background?

So do that, you must save the imagae in .gif or .png to make that work. So make a new image, set the width and height of the image, in the same 'new image box' is a dropdown menu where it sais something like backgound, set it to Transparent.

Paint a circle, File > Save For Web, select GIF and then save it.

You should now have a circly on a transparent background.


If you want to extract something from an image instead, make new image, backgorund = transparent. Copy the image and paste it into your new image. Remove what you want to remove and save for web.

Hope this will help you.

[FrankL]

Thanks very much. That works just fine.

However, I was wishing to use the TIF format as I want to print the image, rather than put it on the web. The print quality in TIF is superior to GIF.

Can I achive the same using a TIF format please?

Regards, Frank

[webmaster]

The only thing I can figure out is if you don't save it in photoshop. For example lets say that you want to copy a face and add it to a background. You have two images, the background and the face. Open the face-image, select the face, copy and paste it into the background.

Save it as .TIF.

So just skip the step where you save it as gif, and copy it instead and the quality should be perfect.

[Kotik]

The quality of .PNG images are very exquisite. If you want to print out an image i would recommend .PNG instead of GIF.

[FrankL]

Thanks very much for trying to help me, but Erh! I'm feeling rather thick! Under the EDIT menu the copy option is greyed out. Mighty confusing the Photoshop!

I just keep thinking to myself, surely this is one of the most obvious and basic things one would like to do with Photoshop. Why does it have to be so difficult?

Confused, Frank

[webmaster]

Yeah, probably =)

You have to select what you want to copy, like CTRL+A for selecting the whole image.

[Phate]

[webmaster]

[Pure_Graphix]

Yes, i am reading through here, and the best way is to save it as a transparent .png, .gifs are for web use with smaller filesize and less quality. What is the other program you are trying to get it into, if i may ask.... I would also suggest selecting the part of the image you want and just pressing ctrl+c and then ctrl+v in the other program for a simple copy and paste. One reason you may have the copy feature greyed out is because your image you are working with mayu be a background image. And locked.. you can either unlock it, or just press ctrl+j to copy the layer into an editable layer, and you should be able to copy from there.... just a few suggestions. If you haven't got it figured out, keep posting, we want to help you.

- pure -

[FrankL]

Is it feasible that Adobe would put such end-user obstacles and difficulty of use in the way of 99.9% of it's ligitimate users merely to 'catch' the 0.1% of software thieves? I find that hard to believe somehow.

I'm really grateful for the reponses and the patience shown to me by you guys. I'm still not able achieve what I want however and have used Corel Draw as a workaround.

I may be completely misundestanding but it seems to me that a sophisticated, feature rich application like Photoshop would not need users to copy and paste to other applications to achieve the 'simplest' of operations.

I will persevere.

Any other contributions and suggestions are most welcome.

Regards, Frank