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.

by Chad Neuman

Adjusting the opacity of shapes and lines can help create interesting designs for flyers, advertisements, or magazine layouts. Here’s a basic technique to add to your design repertoire.

Step 1
Create a new document at 1024×768 pixels and 72 pixels/inch. Click-and-hold the Rectangle tool to get to the Ellipse tool and select it.

Step 2
Click-and-drag a circle, holding Shift to maintain proportion. Click the color on the Options palette and change it to #0e71cd.

Step 3
Click-and-drag a slightly smaller circle, and change the color to #f3a704.

Step 4
Click-and-drag another circle, with the color #10ae00.

Step 5
Click-and-drag the fourth circle, with the color #f6f900. Click-and-drag this shape layer below the previous one in the Layers palette.

Step 6
Change the Transparency of each shape layer to 50% in the Layers palette.

Step 7
Open a night photo and click-and-drag it with the Move tool onto the transparent shapes file. Click-and-drag the new layer below the shapes.

Step 8
Add some white text with the Text tool above the other layers.

Step 9
Click the New Layer icon on the bottom of the Layers palette and select the Brush tool. Change the Brush to soft brush, 65. Click-and-drag some lines. Again, we need to adjust the Opacity. Change the lines slightly, to 95% in the Layers palette.