Expert: LizaL - 6/25/2005

Question
thank you verry much for your fast reply but thats not quite what i ment

is there a way to take the cut out doughnut like you had in the first mov file and make that the hole picture but still have that hole in the middle be transparent

when i said background i ment the backgroud of where i would post it online, usually i would just take the color from where i would post it and make that the background of the photo so it would blend in

but with the project im working on now the color on the website that would be behind the image changes from light gray to dark gray depending on who is viewing the site

i guess what im asking is can you have that doughnut like you had when it was a layer, the background 100% transparent even after flattening it down to save as a jpg





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Followup To
Question -
hello and thank you

I make images for an online fourm and i had this idea to have this pic looks like it hanging off of another
i dont know much about photoshop and im self taught

my question is can i crop or cut in a way other than a square and can i make a hole in it

for example a doughnut is there a way i can crop it down to a circle than cut out the hole part so when its posted online the backgroud shows through the hole

thank you for any help you can give
Phillip smith
Answer -
Hi Phillip,

Sure, you can do what you're talking about. I've created several little movies to give you an idea of how.

1. Using your doughnut example, the key to this first example is using a doughnut picture that has a transparent background. Simple! Just open the doughnut picture, open your "destination" picture (the one that would be the background), and drag the doughnut over the background picture.

To do this, I just selected the Move tool from the tool box (first one in the upper right of the tool box, that looks like a pointer), clicked and dragged the doughnut to the other picture. I used that same tool for moving the doughnut around once I had it in the background picture.
http://little-works.com/all_experts/doughnut1.mov

2. But what if the doughnut doesn't have a transparent background? With a little luck you can use the magic wand to remove the existing background and do the same thing I just did. Make sure you double-click on the Background layer to unlock it first.
http://little-works.com/all_experts/magicwand.mov

3. Or if you want to create your own graphic, you can do so using the Shape tools -- I think you need at least Photoshop 7 for this. I'm not sure if earlier versions have shape tools.

Go to where the shape tools are stored in the tool box: the ninth set of tools on the right. Hold down your mouse button until you see the ellipse shape tool, and then select it. Then, up at the top of your screen, make sure the Shape Layer button is selected. That's the first little box on the left, beside the ellipse tool, at the top of the screen (you'll see it in the movie below). For a perfect circle, hold down your Shift key while you drag a shape over your picture.

Now look over at the set of boxes to the right of the shape tool options -- under the pulldown menus -- and select the Subtract from Shape Area button. This is the middle button, and it "chops" holes into selections.

So with the Subtract from Shape Area button selected, and also the elliptical shape tool selected, draw another circle inside the first circle. When you release the mouse button, you have a hole inside your previously-filled circle.
http://little-works.com/all_experts/shapetool.mov

I hope this helps! But if you need any clarification or any more assistance, please post back.

Lisa


Answer
Hi again Phillip,

Thanks for posting back with the additional information! But I'm not sure I see what you're saying (my bad!).

Are you asking if you could sort of reverse what I showed you -- like when you said "the hole picture" did you mean that the outer part of the doughnut would be transparent?

Also -- are you saving your doughnut as a JPEG, and losing your transparency? If you're saving a JPEG, it will never have transparency. JPEGs will always save with an opaque background. GIF files, on the other hand, retain transparency, and you can use Save for Web to do this:
http://little-works.com/all_experts/saveforweb.mov

Trouble is, you're supposed to save photos as JPEG and graphics as GIF, so if you use a photo of a doughnut, it should be a JPEG, and you'd lose your transparency.

I'm also not clear on why the color changes, depending on who's viewing the Web site.

Anyway, since I'm not understanding this so well without seeing it, let me refer you to a forum where they talked about making a JPEG look like it matches the background of your Web page:
http://www.photoshoptechniques.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-11302.html

Look at the sixth post from the bottom, by someone named stonerunner. He suggests that since JPEGs aren't transparent, you could use the matte field in Save for Web to change the color there to match your background.


Also -- check this out, about making edges transparent, using the PNG format:
http://toolkit.crispen.org/formats/png.html


If none of that works for you or I'm going in the opposite direction of what you want, you might try posting at one of these forums:
http://www.photoshop911.com/

http://www.photoshopsupport.com/resources/photoshop-help.html

http://forums.neverside.com/view/photoshop/

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Also let me throw this out: Why don't you email me a sample of what you've previously done online, or send me the link of a Web site that you have an example of, and I'll tell you how it's done? My regular email address is dead in the water while my Web host is out of town, so you could email this to lizal_ae@hotmail.com.

Either way, I apologize if I've missed the boat here.

But if you can give me a sample of what you want to do, I can go a lot further in trying to help you figure out how it was done.

Thanks,

Lisa


P.S. I'll be checking that email account tomorrow.