By Chad Neuman

This is an often-requested technique from some of my university students, so here’s a tutorial on it. Sometimes you may need to cut out the background from part of a photo and keep the background transparent. Reasons for this include needing a transparent background in a web page design or in an InDesign file. Here’s how to do this.

Step 1
Open an image in Adobe Photoshop.

Step 2
Here’s an important step, because Background layers do not keep deleted pixels as transparent. Double-click on the Background layer in the Layers palette and name the layer (Layer 0 is fine) and click OK. This allows the layer to have a transparent background once we delete some pixels.

Step 3
Use a Selection tool to create a selection of the element to keep. I will go over advanced selection techniques in another tutorial; for this example, we can use the Quick Selection tool or the Polygonal Lasso tool to click around the area and go to Select>Inverse to select everything but the element we want to keep. In this example, it’s the snowboarder. We can refine the edge of the selection by going to Select>Refine Edge if needed.

Step 4
Once the area needed to be transparent is selected, press Delete (PC: Backspace) to delete those pixels. The checkerboard pattern means those pixels are transparent.

Step 5
Here’s another important step. If you save this file as a JPEG, the background will be filled with pixels. Instead, save the file as a GIF (and keep transparency in the save options) or PNG if you need a transparent file for a web site design. If you need to incorporate an element from a photo with a transparent background in an InDesign file, you can save it as a normal Photoshop file (PSD) since they are both owned by Adobe and seamless. When placing the PSD file in InDesign, the file will retain its transparency.