Create a Transparent Background using Adobe Photoshop

Create a Transparent Image using Adobe Photoshop®

If you want to create a nice product design we recommend you to use PNG images.

We'll learn how to create a transparent background with Alpha Channel from a standard image. Photoshop® contains powerful Alpha Channel manipulation features. We'll see here one of the simplest way to proceed: Extrude a part of the image and remove the existing background. Advanced techniques also exist to work with alpha channel. See Photoshop help to read more.

Create a Transparent Image using Adobe PhotoShop®

1. Open your image in Photoshop® (we use version 7.0 in this tutorial). Select File/Open... Choose your file and click Open. The file will open in a separate document window>

2. If the file is not in RGB format (16.8 M colors), convert it: Choose Image/Mode/RGB Color.

3. Now select the background area of the image (the area you wish to remove). If the image background has a solid color (white in our example), select the Magic Wand Tool (W) or click in the toolbox. Be sure to specify Tolerance=10, Anti-aliased and Contiguous in the selection options (dialog box on top, under the menu). You may need to adjust the tolerance value (it depends on your image). When done, click in the background area of the image ():

4. A selection dashed-line appears around the logo and around the square border of the image. It means that the background is selected (not the logo). If the background is not made of a solid color, you can select it by using the Polygonal Lasso Tool (L) or click . It's a bit more difficult but that's the only way to proceed.

5. Now, we'll select the logo only. To do so, choose Select/Inverse (Shft+Ctrl+I). It's almost unchanged but the dashed-line around the square border of the image has disappeared.

6. Choose Edit/Copy (Ctrl+C), then Edit/Paste (Ctrl+V) to create a new layer with the "extruded" logo in it. The "layers" list has been updated (see below). The new layer, which is selected, appears at the top of the list (). The original image is present in the background (). Now, we'll hide the original image by clicking on the "eye" button of the background layer (). If you want, you can also delete it by drag-and-drop it on the trash (at the right-bottom corner of the list).

5. The image document now looks like shown below. The background area (which was white) has disappeared. Now you see a gray-checkboard-like texture around the logo () indicating that this area is in fact transparent.

6. We recommend to save the image to another file to keep the original one intact. Select "File/Save As...". In Format box, select "PNG" (our favorite format).Click Save. Select Interlace: "None", click OK.

7. You're done, the transparent version of your image is created.