Image modification question

Factual Questions
1

I’m making an invitation to a cocktail party. I want to use this image for the background with text bordering it. However, I’m photoshop impaired.

Pasting the image into powerpoint results in the inclusion of a white background matte. How can I manipulate the image to get rid of the background matte?

With specific instructions, I could do the image mod in photoshop. Ideally, this would create an image that could be pasted into powerpoint sans white matte.

2

Here you go. You just need to make the white border transparant and change the file to a format that supports transparency.

3

BTW, I tested it in POWERPOINT and it works fine. It’s a little rough around the edges, but I think it will be alright for your invitations.

4

This worked for me (Photoshop 7, PowerPoint 2002):

  1. Load or paste the t-shirt picture into Photoshop.
  2. Use the Magic Wand tool to select the white background, then hit Delete.
  3. If you don’t see the gray-and-white checkerboard right away (which might happen if you paste the image rather than loading it), delete the background layer by right-clicking on it in the Layers window and selecting Delete Layer.
  4. Select Save for Web from the File menu and save the image as a GIF. Make sure Transparency is checked. Under the Transparency checkbox, select Diffusion Transparency Dither. (There will be a white border around the t-shirt if you don’t select this.)
  5. Use Insert > Picture > From File to insert the image into PowerPoint.

Hopefully that’ll work for you. Someone else may well have a much better/easier/faster way of doing it, though.

5

Bear_Nenno: The ‘rough around the edges’ problem is why you beat me to the answer. =) It happened to me, too (only it was a thin white outline around the shirt). Turning on ‘Diffusion Transparency Dither’ seemed to solve that problem. Unfortunately, I don’t have a way of posting the completed image to the Web.

The white border wasn’t there in Photoshop; I think it happened during the conversion to GIF. You might be also able to make the background transparent simply by filling in the background with some color like bright green or magenta that doesn’t appear in the image. (Well, those are the usual colors. An image of a Hawaiian shirt might well contain either or both of them.) Then designate the background as the transparent color. In Photoshop you do this by selecting the color in the table on the right of the Save For Web window, then clicking the ‘map selected colors to transparency’ button. When I tried this, I had to select more than one color to stop the shirt from having magenta edges.

6

If you have one that looks better around the edges, you can upload it free at

http://imageshack.us/index3.php

7

Both approaches worked. I kinda liked the look of the rough around the edges sample but Roches approach yielded the higher quality result.

I used Roches approach to generate this.

8

When you select an area to be masked in Photoshop, you can either “grow” the selection or expand it by x number of pixels, to get rid of any white edges.