Help w/ Photoshop

[Mythra]

Ok, my friend has been trying to teach me some things in photoshop 7.0 but I can't remember half the things he showed me so I need a little help. If you take a look at my avatar, you'll see it has a white background on it. My friend showed me a way to get rid of backgrounds like that and to just have the object itself (in this case, the A Perfect Circle logo). If anyone could please show me how to get rid of that white background I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks in advance

[Pheesh]

you make a new file but set the background to transparent. Or you make a new file the usual way and use the background eraser tool. Hope that helps.

Stay Essential
EE

P.S. You're choice in music is sick.

[Miriel]

You can have transparent backgrounds if you save the image as a gif or a png file. If the background itself was already transparent to begin with of course. If you started off with a colored background, you'd have to cut away or erase the background to make it transparent and then save it as a gif or a png. PNG transparencies can't be seen properly on internet explorer though.

[Yamaneko]

You can dump the background in the garbage if it's a layer on its own.

[o_O]

If the background was already transparent, do this:
Go to File > Save for web (Alt + Ctrl + Shift + S) and save it as a PNG or GIF, which support transparency.

If the background wasn't already transparent, do this:
First, create a new layer (Ctrl + Shift + N). In the layers palette, click on the background layer, and Ctrl + A to select the whole thing, go back to your new layer, and Ctrl + V it into that one. This layer is for if you need to start again, so click the visibility icon (little eye) next to your new layer.
Now, switch back to your background layer, and press Alt + Ctrl + X to get into the extract filter. A screen will pop up, and you'll see that you're using a highlighter tool (Note: Zoom in with Ctrl + Plus). Now, you need to use the highlighter tool to highlight only the edges of the image that you want to keep.
Here's a picture of what to do. I use a highlighter of size 3 to highlight the edges.
<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v92/ifiredanuke/extract.png" />

After that, click Extract, and you should have your image minus the background. Then just Ctrl + Alt + Shift + S and save as a PNG or a GIF.

Here's one I prepared earlier, it's not the best, but I extracted it, and applied a bit of blur and lowered the opacity of the loopy bits slightly.

<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v92/ifiredanuke/apcavatar.png" />

[Mythra]

Originally posted by eternal essence:

P.S. You're choice in music is sick.

Thanks for that and thanks to everyone who helped me with this, really means alot.

[Leeza]

OOC:	Actually, I think your choice in music rocks.

[Miriel]

OOC:	Actually, I think your choice in music rocks.

I think eternal essence meant "sick" as in awesome, rather than "sick" as in... well, sick.

[Leeza]

OOC:	Oh yeah. There's a new meaning for <i>sick</i>. Okay, then. Your choice in music is very sick.

[Pheesh]

Leeza is down with the new age lingo....WORD!

and no problemo, it's about time there were a few tool and apc sets on this site.

Stay Essential
EE