Expert: Amy - 12/23/2004

Question
Thank you so much Amy! Your advice was excellent. I'm going to go with the magic wand/feather option and go from there. The background will be white. The image will be used on a white T shirt. What do you think of that – in terms of overall quality?

Thanks again!


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Followup To
Question -
Hello
Happy Holidays!

I have a question for you. I have a graphic (of a globe w/ flags sticking out of it) with a background. I need to knock out the “colored” background and make the background white. I started this task in Illustrator using the paint bucket tool to “white out” the background. BUT the graphic has many “nooks & cranny's”. I know there is a more efficient way of achieving this. Can you provide a solution? Thanks a million for any assistance you can provide!

You can take a look at the graphic here:
www.profileworld.com/globe.pdf

Answer -
Hi Nisa,

Sometimes there's just no simple way of getting a nice product. That's a difficult image to work with.  Because the colors of the sky background are used in the globe and flags, too, you can't simply knock out the sky.

I guess you have a couple good options:

1) Use the paint bucket with anti-alias option checked and a soft paint brush in PhotoShop or another image editing program to paint over the background.

It's going to take a long time, but you'll have the most control and best end product. I think this is what you are doing but you said Illustrator.  If you have PhotoShop, this is what you should be working with.

You can also use the Magic Wand Tool (W) set to a tolerance in the 30s to select large areas of the sky.  Then choose Select > Feather and feather those selections to 1 or 2 pixels and fill them/delete them.  With the feathering, you'll get a nice smooth edge instead of choppy.

2) The other option is to create a clipping mask in PhotoShop. But I need to warn you. The trouble with clipping masks is that the tolerance minimum is .5 pixels, which creates a jagged edged clipping path.  So you're still going to see chunks of that purply background peeking through unless you clip really tight... which is going to look very obvious. If your new background color is going to be a similar purply color this might be an option for you but otherwise, you're better off going with the freehand coloring method.

PhotoShop clipping mask creation:
Work with the Magic Wand tool (W) with a tolerance of about 32 and the Lasso tool (L) to select the areas you want to eliminate.  When you've got everything selected, Select Inverse (Shift + Ctrl + I) and you'll now have only the good stuff in the selection area.

Next display the paths window (Window > Show Paths).

Now choose 'Make working path' from the flyout menu on the upper right hand corner of the Paths window.

Then double click on the path name in the window and it will change itself to Path 1.  Then use the flyout menu again and designate Path 1 as the clipping path.

Save the image as PhotoShop EPS and import into Illustrator.

You can also draw your own clipping mask in Illustrator using the pen and pencil tools.  Basically you'll need to use the pen tool to trace the parts of the image you want to keep. I've tried this on the sample you pointed me too and I don't think you'll like the results, so I won't go into detail (you can find directions on making clipping masks in Illustrator's help file). You'll get very square corners and you'll lose the painterly effect near the edges of all the flagpoles, flags, etc.

So, in short, sometimes you just have to sit down with your image and a cup of coffee (or egg nog) and erase until your fingers fall off or the sun comes up, whichever happens first.  Tip: Do frequent saves.

Happy holidays!
Amy Pace

Answer
Well, if you are having them printed professionally, the t-shirt printer might tell you that the image itself isn't high enough resolution...not much you can do about that. Just don't enlarge it too much or it will look bitmapped. But I don't know if you were showing me the actual file or just a preview of it. You might have a higher-res original.

If you are doing a t-shirt transfer yourself, it'll be fine.

It's a very cute design.  I like that style of artwork.

My only further suggestion is that when you're done cleaning it up, make sure you have every last pixel gone around the main white space by setting the wand to zero tolerance, no anti-aliasing, and clicking on the white area to make sure no little specks show up.  Look especially closely around the edge of the document.

Good luck!
Amy