Thursday, January 26, 2017

How to easily remove a black or white solid background in PSP x8x

This is an easy trick that many of you novice users may not know about. When I say novice, I do not mean newbies, but those who do not use it for professional reasons.

There is no need to use this for gradient backgrounds because the background remover does a rather fine job of that and this not so much in that instance. This is best used on a black or white solid background.
It's actually really a simple thing. Let's use this as an example:


Now the above is from Wikipedia but I just took a screencap and am using that. The original was simply too large and I didn't feel like downloading it so I just screencapped and cropped, but you'll get the idea here. 

Also, before we move on, know that if you cannot see the caps, don't worry you're not alone. You can click on them if you can't tell what they are and they will be the normal size. 



Instructions Sreen Captures
Right click on the background.
Select Promote Background Layer.
It will look like this and say:
Raster 1.
Hover over the mask icon at the bottom and it should say:
New mask layer.
Hit the down arrow and select:
From image
Select:
Source luminance
and
Invert mask data.
Then click:
OK
It will look like this now. Even though the white is gone in the image, we're not yet finished.
Right click and select:
Merge
then:
Merge group
Tada! This is now what you have and you're finished.
But wait! What about black? Remember when you selected:Invert mask data?
Well de-select it to remove black. Here you can see that the black drawings are gone.

Did this help you? I love this trick and use it quite often. I actually have x9 sitting on my desk but I've been too lazy to install it. If you have it, then it will still work and honestly, it seems like if you go way back before Corel even bought PSP when it was actually PSP v. 7 I believe it worked then too.

What other tricks do you know?

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