Making a color transparent in Photoshop

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Making a color transparent in Photoshop

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_gail Posts: 2876 From: So FL Status: offline	Making a color transparent in Photoshop - 2/6/2003 7:23:58 How do you make a background color transparent in Photoshop? I' ve been reading about it in Photoshop help area and been playing until I' m blue in the face. My goal is to make a transparent gif, with a decent looking drop shadow, as the sample below. According the Photoshop Help: Select a combination of Transparency and Matte options to specify how transparent pixels in the image are optimized: - To make fully transparent pixels transparent and blend partially transparent pixels with a color, select Transparency and select a matte color. - To make all pixels with greater than 50% transparency fully transparent and all pixels with 50% or less transparency fully opaque, select Transparency and choose None from the Matte menu. - To fill fully transparent pixels with the selected color and blend partially transparent pixels with the same color, select a matte color and deselect Transparency. thanks, gail Attachment (1) _____________________________ Digicamhelp - Easiest place on the web to learn about Digit@l Cameras & Photography


Bpete Posts: 113 Joined: 12/3/2001 From: Fort Lauderdale Florida USA Status: offline	RE: Making a color transparent in Photoshop - 2/7/2003 0:42:00 Hi Gail, Ok, lets see if I can help ... don' t know if I can or not. 1st off you cannot make a drop shadow gif transparent in the way I think you are thinking (how' s that for guessing?). You can easily make the text with a transparent background with no shadow. Now you can make a gif with a shadow and in spite of what I just said, you can make it appear to have a shadow and be matted onto the page ... IF ... the page and the immediate background of the gif are the same color. Try this in Photoshop. File new> select transparent > type text on it' s own layer, pick a color ... red is good. Double click on the layer and add a drop shadow. (make sure that text is the only layer turned on) then go to File and select Save For Web which brings up the Save for Web window. Pick GIF, make sure that Transparency is unchecked then go to the little Matte box and choose a nice color, maybe a good blue. Select OK> save the file. So you will have a nice red text with blue background with a drop shadow. Now the only trick is to make the background on the web page the same color as the matte blue that you chose. In FP you can use the dropper to choose the blue from your gif file and the illusion is complete. Of course that' s not the only way to approach it, just one way, as is usual in Photoshop. You could use white or black for your matte as well if you were using a black or white page ... or note the color of your page in FP and match the color in when you matte, etc. ... Without the dropshadow on under your text, you would click the transparency box and the gif will just go over whatever color your page is. Hope that came close to making some sense. Bpete (in reply to _gail)


_gail Posts: 2876 From: So FL Status: offline	RE: Making a color transparent in Photoshop - 2/7/2003 8:01:49 Wow, Bpete, was this ever helpful!! My mistake was that I added the background color before doing a Save for Web. I erroneously thought that I needed to select the background color with the eyedropper in the Save for Web dialog box to make it transparent...similar to how you do it in FrontPage. But by bringing the text in on one (transparent) layer and doing what you suggested with the Matte box worked! The only thing, and it was probably a typo, you wrote in the third paragraph that " Transparency is unchecked..." For this to work, transparency should be checked. I' m a very happy camper! Attachment (1) < Message edited by _gail -- 2/7/2003 8:26 AM > _____________________________ Digicamhelp - Easiest place on the web to learn about Digit@l Cameras & Photography (in reply to Bpete)