StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I haven't been able to find a large enough Cyberman head thingy for my silly game, so I tried to turn the background of this image to a transparency - it's large enough, it's sharp enough and it's even the new cybermen - but the brushed-metal texture used is a little beyond me. I either end up taking bits of the head off, or leaving little bits of background behind. Any hints? I'm planning on losing the outer background, keeping the 'ring and tear', and losing the darker background inside the ring.




PS It occurs that I'm just a rube at adding tranparencies: my av is currently the symbol of the Hammer of Light from Freespace, but the 'background removal' is really, really messy. I bet it looks HORRIBLE on forum themes with dark backgrounds. Is there an easier/more effective/tidier method I'm not using?

Well, the only sure fire way to get a clean avatar is to do it by hand, which means you take the lasso and pain-stakingly cut it out by hand. Lots of time involved.

You know, I've been hoping there was a better way for ages. Is there a way to use the lasso in bits, and not have it complete the circle every time you release the mouse button?

EDIT - also, I've never been able to find the button that makes it easy to find bits against the 'transparent' checkerboard. In the HOL example, there are lots of little white bits left, but I can't see them in PS because of the bloody background.

IIRC, shift while clicking with lasso allows you to plot points, making for easy straight lines. Been a while since I'ved used gimp/ps

Thanks. I know I only post in AMP because I suck at Photoshop, but thanks for everyone being so patient.

Oh wow, your av is a lot better *thumbs up*

LOL I can only imagine how crap it looked on the darker themes here.

Something I noticed while lassoing my way through the image, was that using the 'background eraser' to reveal the transparent background often 'bled' outside the lasso. The image is pretty low-res (200x200), but pixels outside the lasso area would often become fainter if I passed the eraser over the near edge. As an experiment I pointed it at a lasso'd area near one of the squigly lines on my av, and clicking over and over gradually eliminated the whole thing. Is this normal? Usually I use the eraser in long, constant swipes, but am I losing bits of the image when I move it along the edges of the lasso?

Here is my crappy take on it.

OOOO you even got the eyes! Thanks!

It looks like you and I had a similar problem - because the background is 'recessed' behind the head thing, there are shadows and overlaps that make the left side of the image 'heavier' than the right. I'm not sure how to fix anything like that.

Lemme give it a whirl.

[edit]Done. I did kind of a hack job on the ring part. Also, when I loaded it, I forgot to turn off the drop shadow. I'll upload the right version later when I'm un-busy

If you can figure out how to make that a high quality PNG in avatar size that is under the file size limit, you're a better man than I, but there you go.

Holy crap! Those are excellent! I don't have a clue how you did it so accurately and so fast!

Not to sound ungrateful, but I was hoping to keep the 'tear', the little circle on the bottom-left corner. Cyberman eyes have the same feature, so it makes the outer ring a Cybereye with the 'head and shoulders' inside it. Is there any way I could attach it?

It is done. I overwrote the file, so it is in my last post.

As for how I did it, let's just say that I have powers that some might find... unnatural.

Woo! By the way, I don't intend to use it as an av: the 6kb limit makes that way too hard. Galactic Civilisations 2 uses 200x200 pngs for race logos, and I like the idea of handing Cyberheads off everyone's planets.

EDIT - It looks like you erased the stuff outside the ring, and then used the something to transparent-ificate the inner background. Irfanview shows wierd junk in areas I've cleared with the 'background eraser', even if it's transparent, and your file looks the same.

I'm looking at my file in photoshop and I'm not finding any weird junk on the outside part of it.

What I did was put a transparant layer and a black layer underneath the image of the Cyberman. Then I cleared everything but the dude and cleaned it up, looking at the Cyberman over the black background to make sure there wasn't any junk. After I was satified by the lack of pixels outside of the logo area, I removed the black area and saved it as a PNG-24. There shouldn't be junk on the outside, because those pixels are all 100% transparant.

I tell you, Irfanview is WIERD. There's no junk: the image you posted is clean. Irfanview just draws images with transparencies really, really wierd.

Stark wrote:I tell you, Irfanview is WIERD. There's no junk: the image you posted is clean. Irfanview just draws images with transparencies really, really wierd.

It might be doing some sort of funky compression thing where it is adding artifacts to it. I don't know, I'm not familiar with Irfanview.

Since it displays 'magic erased' or 'background erased' stuff as strange artefacts but 'erased' bits as transparent, it's the only tool I had for cleaning up my images. Looking at it in Irfanview would show me if I'd missed bits. Because of the junk, I can't tell where the actual nontransparent parts are... so I just went over the whole lot again. Thanks again for the image!

EDIT - Stark FTW! Saving as PNG-8, greyscale, 100x100, 16 colours... it's av-workable!