Paintshop question - how to make this transparent?

Mitth`raw`nuruodo · Post by **Mitth`raw`nuruodo** » 2004-09-07 01:56pm

Okay, I have this image:

What I want to do is make the background of the image transparent, leaving the arm and stuff. How will I do this in PSP8?

salm · Post by **salm** » 2004-09-07 02:00pm

Mitth`raw`nuruodo wrote:Okay, I have this image:

What I want to do is make the background of the image transparent, leaving the arm and stuff. How will I do this in PSP8?

delete paintshop and get photoshop. then use the magic wand selection tool to select all the black pixels. hit delete. save as gif or tiff or some other file that supports transparancy.

Mitth`raw`nuruodo · Post by **Mitth`raw`nuruodo** » 2004-09-07 02:35pm

salm wrote:delete paintshop and get photoshop.

Can't do. Not right now, anyway.

then use the magic wand selection tool to select all the black pixels. hit delete. save as gif or tiff or some other file that supports transparancy.

PSP has the same magic wand... I'll show you the result (and this is after I've fooled with it, deleting some individual pixels that the magic wand refused to grab)

Not quite satisfactory, methinks.

EDIT: Fucker didn't even become transparent. Argh.
EDIT2: I is a moron.
EDIT3: Now it's transparent, but... well, look at it.

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2004-09-07 04:03pm

Get THE GIMP!!!! (it's free AND it doesn't suck). Then do the magic wand thing with it. If there are black pixels left over use the erase tool on 'em. I suppose you could use paint shop to do the same thing with paintshop but i've never used it.

Tsyroc · Post by **Tsyroc** » 2004-09-07 05:32pm

This is what I got when using the Paintbrush program that comes with
Windows. It actually looks decent on the Black Soul theme but looked
rather crapy on a white background.

On Paintbrush I just converted the picture to a gif and saved it. Once it was in gif form you can go under attributes and make a color transparent. Just pic the one you want and it usually works when the colors are pretty basic. It gets a bit screwy when you have colors of that don't quite match the palatte exactly. It in those instances when more advance programs that allow you to hunt down the various wayward pixils by selecting them directly and therefore adding their color to the transparency.

I can't really help you with the program you have since I have absolutely zero experience with it. I usually use Adobe Photo Deluxe which is sort of the super poorman's version of Photoshop that came with one of my dearly departed scanners.

Tsyroc · Post by **Tsyroc** » 2004-09-07 05:36pm

It looks like you got about the same result that I did. It does look good on Black Soul but it looks pretty bad on white so it won't do well on the SubSilver theme.

If you'll notice the grenades/hearts on the two I did are a little goofy looking that happend when Paintbrush converted it from jpg to gif format.

Post by **Dalton** » 2004-09-07 08:22pm

Tsyroc wrote:If you'll notice the grenades/hearts on the two I did are a little goofy looking that happend when Paintbrush converted it from jpg to gif format.

That's a result of the GIF color pallette I think.

Mitth · Post by **Mitth** » 2004-09-07 09:49pm

darthdavid wrote:Get THE GIMP!!!! (it's free AND it doesn't suck). Then do the magic wand thing with it. If there are black pixels left over use the erase tool on 'em. I suppose you could use paint shop to do the same thing with paintshop but i've never used it.

I downloaded it, but due to my current situation (read Gaming & Computers), I don't have the proper access to install it. Hooray.

Cyborg Stan · Post by **Cyborg Stan** » 2004-09-08 12:07am

Since everyone else seems to be ignorant of this feature that's been in there since at least PSP 7...

(Of course, if you wish for the black parts of inside the grenade itself to be the same you'll have to select the area manually. Often times, I simply 'close off' areas using an otherwise irrevalent line of colors such as green before using the magic wand tool again.)

The optimizer works with pretty much every format PSP supports. I also decided to try converting it to a transparent image myself, converting it a 16 color PNG to save space.

(PNG, 3008 bytes)

Mitth · Post by **Mitth** » 2004-09-08 02:00am

Stan, I love you.

I have run the optimizer, but somehow I never made it work. I think messing with the tolerance was what I had to do. Oh well. Thanks!

salm · Post by **salm** » 2004-09-08 05:54am

for a really good result you´ll probably have to do some annoying pixeling by hand.

Tsyroc · Post by **Tsyroc** » 2004-09-09 12:49am

So, I just saw a commercial today and this picture is from Green Day's "American Idiot" album cover.

Cyborg Stan · Post by **Cyborg Stan** » 2004-09-09 02:58am

That's what it was? I could get a better source image now...

Redone to take care of some of the jagged edge pieces that show up in white backgrounds. (Of course, now the hand wouldn't show up AT ALL in pure white backgrounds now.)

For the smaller one, it was a simple case of locking transparency, using two types of resizing algorithms and then overlaying an opacity mask from one over the other. The bigger one was much more straightforward, just a clean up and a resize.

(PNG, 2222 bytes, 30 colors)

(PNG, 8 colors + 8-bit alpha trans, 10,361 bytes)

(PNG, 15441 bytes, 2425 colors + 8-bit alpha trans)

The smallest one is jaggy in dark backgrounds and the middle one still has some fuzz in dark backgrounds. It's too tiresome for me to try to fix at the moment now.