Ok, what I want to do is turning out to be a little more difficult than usual. I can find plenty of tutorials on making parts of images transparent or semi-transparent. I can work out how to do this from scratch, creating an image. The problem here is I am not creating an image from scratch - I want to take an existing flat image with existing background and remove background and be left with an image (complete with transparent and semi-transparent areas) which I can then save to a PNG or use on any other background I wish.

To illustrate what I want to do, I have made mockup images below. Image 1 shows an image with a black background. I want to remove the black background but leave the image and semi-transparent "rays" intact so they can be placed onto a different background, as in image 2. Note that the "rays" appear over the new background colour.

image 1 http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y265/BlackDalek/kbblack.png

image 2 http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y265/BlackDalek/kbcolour.png

If anyone knows how to achieve this, please ellaborate. Feel free to download and use the above kbblack.png image to explain how to get from image 1 to image 2.

Thanks

On 10/16/2010 07:05 AM, BlackDalek wrote:

Ok, what I want to do is turning out to be a little more difficult than usual. I can find plenty of tutorials on making parts of images transparent or semi-transparent. I can work out how to do this from scratch, creating an image. The problem here is I am not creating an image from scratch - I want to take an existing flat image with existing background and remove background and be left with an image (complete with transparent and semi-transparent areas) which I can then save to a PNG or use on any other background I wish.

To illustrate what I want to do, I have made mockup images below. Image 1 shows an image with a black background. I want to remove the black background but leave the image and semi-transparent "rays" intact so they can be placed onto a different background, as in image 2. Note that the "rays" appear over the new background colour.

image 1 http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y265/BlackDalek/kbblack.png

image 2 http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y265/BlackDalek/kbcolour.png

If anyone knows how to achieve this, please ellaborate. Feel free to download and use the above kbblack.png image to explain how to get from image 1 to image 2.

Thanks

I get fairly close results by using two layers for the cat from top to bottom:

1) Plain cutout from original by using the magic wand on the background (the goal being to get a cutout of the center of the cat) with a 5pix grow/feather

2) "color to alpha" from original using black as the color.

3) Diagonal gradient using colors picked from your color version

I tried your suggestion. Your method produced far better results than what I managed (trying to use a layer mask). I think I can get around the problem using a combination of clever curve manipulation, desaturation and colour to alpha. Thanks.