Expert: Glen Demers - 3/6/2009

Question
I need to eliminate the white background from an image of a '59 Chevy which has a shadow underneath to keep it from looking like it's floating. I want to keep the shadow with soft edges, but drop out all the white, however I need to create a clipping path so I can pull it into Illustrator or Quark where it will have a transparent background instead of being in a white box. Can you help?
Sincerely,
Marianne
P.S. Thanks again for your advice on my last question re distorting a 2-D shape into an arc shape. Since I don't have PS-CS2 (only PS-CS) to use the Transform tool, I took your mention of AI's Envelope Distort tool and accomplished the task perfectly! You saved the day and were the only expert who knew what I was talking about. T-H-A-N-K-S!!!!!! :)

Answer
Hi Marianne,

A clipping path gives you a hard edge, so I would recommend you outline just the car, dropping out the white background and shadow.
The shadow can be added back in  later as a drop shadow in Quark or Illustrator.
Another method would be to create a separate bitmap image of just the shadow in Photoshop and add this between the car and background in your layout program. Once you create a shadow. convert to greyscale and then make it a high resolution (1200 - 1800 dpi) bitmap file using diffusion dithering. This will give you a transparent shadow file.

Hope this helps,
Glen Demers
Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop 7
Prepress Technician, Best Printing Online
www.bestprintingonline.com

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