A Photoshop Question on transparent background

[Daniel Grenier]

A pro at Photoshop I am not, but many of you are so here goes:

I have a scan of a device (a cell phone circuit board) which inevitably produces a white background around the board. I have to bring the board onto a template without the white background showing - only the board. What is the best way to remove the background and thus isolate the board ? I use Photoshop Elements.

Thanks for your help.

[Marko]

Hey Daniel,

I think this might answer your question:

http://www.axialis.com/tutorials/tutorial-misc001.html

It is a Photoshop tutorial, though, not Elements. I never used Elements myself and I'm not sure if Elements (which version?) provides layering and blending in the same way as PS does.

If this doesn't work for you, you can always use a magic wand selection set to Continuos and play with Tolerance and Aliasing. In Photoshop, Tolerance of 20-32 and Aliasing ON tend to work fine on examples such as you describe. Or at least good enough.

Hope this helps,

Marko

[Richard M. Coda]

Hi Daniel:

I can't tell you how many of these I have "silhouetted" in the course of my work. The "pro" (I am a graphic designer by day) way is to use "paths" in Photoshop (I don't know if Elements has paths... I would assume not).

Paths are actually like drawing in Illustrator. They are vector objects, versus "raster" (pixels) objects. They are device independent and scale to any dimension without loss in quality.

The PCBs I have done (for a very large telephone equipment company) typically took between a half an hour and an hour to do. At an average graphic designer's salary that can run anywhere from $35 to $100.

[percepts]

A pro at Photoshop I am not, but many of you are so here goes:

I have a scan of a device (a cell phone circuit board) which inevitably produces a white background around the board. I have to bring the board onto a template without the white background showing - only the board. What is the best way to remove the background and thus isolate the board ? I use Photoshop Elements.

Thanks for your help.

use the magic wand 12, not anti-aliased, continuous to select all of the white background.
then feather the selection by 1 or 2 pixels. (have to experiment to get optimum)
then invert the selection
then copy
then paste
then delete the background layer.

p.s. this assumes elements allows layers

[Doug Dolde]

Using Save for Web & Devices in CS4 allows you to save as a .png with a transparent background. Don't know if that works for your situation.