Decal information needed

[Donny Lawson]

I'm about ready to start turning pens and would like to find out some information on how to remove the background on pictures so I can print them on to waterslide paper and transfer to my pens. Is there a download or is there some software I can buy to do this? Say, if I have a picture of a truck in my yard,can I completely take everything away except the truck and make it look good?

[Scott Hubl]

Photoshop.

[Dan Hintz]

There are a number of plug-ins for Photoshop (and similar programs that accept PS plug-ins) as well as several tailor-made programs for trimming out backgrounds.

And for the life of me I'm drawing a blank on the names of any of those right now...

[John Keeton]

You can use the magic wand feature function in Photoshop Elements (trimmed down version of Photoshop) and save the file as a .tiff which will retain the layers - i.e., doesn't "flatten" the image. You will need to play with the tolerance setting. The more contrast between the object and the background the easier it is to get a clean cut.

[Steve Schlumpf]

Check around a little because there are free programs out there that offer close to the same features as Photoshop. What you are looking for is one that offers layers, magic wand feature to select a range of pixels and an erase function.

Check out: http://www.getpaint.net/index.html

And: http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm

[Dan Hintz]

While I find Paint.NET to be a very powerful program (and its out-of-the-box performance at masking to be second to none), I still find it falling short to a good tailor-made masking program on troublesome images. If this thread pops up again while I'm at home, I'll dig through my bookmarks and try to find a few program/plug-in names.

[Simon Bramley]

Donny, you may want to look at using GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/) which is a freeware application that contains many features of photoshop.
I used it for a while before aquiring Photoshop, and for the price (i.e nothing) it is remarkable.
Like Photoshop though, you will need to invest some time getting to know how to use it: It's not an app that you can master in 5 minutes.
Good luck.

[Donny Lawson]

I will look at these and maybe come up with something.What I would like is, a program that I can take a picture and click on something in the picture and it will outline the item and remove everything else. Will Photoshop do that?

[John Keeton]

Donny, the magic wand does work similar to what you are after, but not exactly. There are a couple of distinctions.

First, when you use the magic wand and click on the object, it will separate the background (sort of - more on that) and create a dotted line around the object. You then create a layer from the background, and then you can cut the background. That leaves your object on a clear background.

However, the problem arises when you do not have a lot of clear contrast between the object and the background. With the example of the "truck in the yard", if the truck is photographed against an object of similar "density/color/hue" then the magic wand may not be able to distinguish. That is when you must play with the "tolerance" setting. You also may need to clean up the image with the eraser. Best to enlarge the image considerably to do the cleanup so as to get as sharp an edge as possible. Some photos work very well, some take quite a bit of cleanup.

Background is very important. If you know you are going to be doing this, take the photograph such that the background is not "busy" and contrasts heavily with the object. Eliminate shadows as much as possible, as they tend to blur the outline.

[Dan Hintz]

Best to zoom into the image considerably to do the cleanup so as to get as sharp an edge as possible.
Fixed that for ya... "enlarge" usually means "artificially increase number of pixels" to most people (especially newbies), and that can trash an image's quality.