Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To and today I'm going to show you how to take a
simple JPEG or PNG and convert it to a transparent PNG, so you can see behind it. Alright, let's get
started. So this is something that's pretty easy to do if you have a simple JPEG, like if it has a
white background like this. I downloaded this design from Vecteezy. And I'm using the JPEG.
But if you have an EPS, obviously, you can just take that into Illustrator, and save as a PNG with
transparency. So let's say you only have the JPEG, or a PNG. I'm going to drag this onto my Photoshop
icon. And the first thing we need to do is just unlock this background. So I'm going to click on
the lock button to unlock it. And you'll notice that this design has really clean edges and a lot
of contrast. So that's important because Photoshop relies on contrast when it makes selections.
I want to get my magic wand tool by hitting W on the keyboard, that's also right over here. And I
want to put my tolerance at 10 up here at the top. And this tolerance tells Photoshop how much of
the color you want to select. We want to select the white out here, but we don't want to select
the white in here. So we'll also need to make sure Contiguous is checked. Now this white looks pretty
solid, so we'll probably only need 10. But there are probably some pieces really close in here,
close to the pink, that it will see as not being white. So I'll show you what I mean in a minute.
Okay, so let's click the background. And you can see it's made a selection out here,
so let's come up here and select Inverse. Now we have just the logo itself selected. Now we
can click this button right down here at the bottom of our Layers palette to add a layer
mask. And you can see that it's added it right up here. And now our background is transparent,
so if we add another color behind it, we can see how well it did. Let's go ahead and create a new
layer. And then I'm just going to drag this one underneath the one with the logo. I'm going to
hit D on my keyboard to give me a black foreground and a white background. And then I'll hit OPTION
Delete - that's ALT Delete on a PC - to fill that layer with the foreground color, which is black.
Now this looks really nice right now, but let's zoom in really close to the edge. So now I can see
I got a few more white pixels on the edge that weren't selected with the selection. Honestly,
since at full size i looks really great, I wouldn't worry about it. But to fix it, we can
undo back to our selection. So I'm going to hit CMD Z, or CTRL Z on a PC to get all the way back
to where I have just a logo selected, then I'm going to come up here to Select > Modify > and
Contract. So I want my selection to come in maybe a pixel or so I'm going to contract by one pixel
and say OK. So it brought in just a tiny bit, you probably won't even be able to tell.
And now we can come down here and do our layer mask, we'll add the dark layer in again. And
now when we zoom in, there are no white pixels. This really depends on how high quality your PNG
or JPEG is. This one is super high resolution. So it's able to kind of see those areas better
than if you had a low quality JPEG. Okay, now I'm going to just delete the layer that I created.
And now it's time to export it. So we can go to File > Export, and quick export as PNG.
I think the default settings on this will automatically make it a transparent PNG. Let's
go ahead and save. And now I'm going to come out here and look at how it did. If I hit my spacebar
on the Mac, it shows me that my background is gone. So that's exactly what I want. Now I'm
going to show you a different way to do the same thing with this logo. I'll bring in the JPG again.
First, I'll unlock the background, I'll hit W on my keyboard to get to my Wand over here.
But this time, I'm not going to choose Contiguous. I'm going to increase my
tolerance so that I get a little more of the white just to make sure because I'm planning
on deleting all the white inside here too. And then I can just click out here. And this time
it's grabbed all the white and the whole logo. Now I'll select Inverse, and I'll make my mask.
So now we have a one color logo. There's no white in here at all anymore. So this means we can add
some layer styles to this, and it'll still look pretty good. Let's select our layer and then come
down here to the Fx. And now we'll do Gradient Overlay. And now there's a gradient applied to
the logo. I'm going to click on this logo, and I'm just going to come in here and choose
maybe this yellow to orange one. And we'll say OK. So that's looking pretty nice. We can uncheck
that and choose Color Overlay if we want to change this to white, or black, really any color we want.
We'll say OK. And you can play around with all these other styles by just clicking them on and
off to see what they do. Just keep in mind, a lot of these are going to make it look pretty ugly.
I'll say OK. And now I'm going to go ahead and export this one - Quick export as a PNG.
And we'll call this one white. And I'll come out here and look at it and see how it looks.
That looks pretty nice. All right, now let's try with a less simple logo, I got this logo from 99
Designs - it's not my logo. So it's fine for practice, but this isn't something I obviously
would use in a project or something like that. I'm going to drag it onto my Photoshop icon. And now
let's see what's going on. We've got a little bit of a lower res image. When you zoom in,
you can see the pixelation a little better. I've got some drop shadows here, but we still
have a lot of contrast between this color and the background. Okay, so let's unlock the background.
I'll hit W on my keyboard to get my Wand tool. And I think I'm going to keep my tolerance at 25.
And we'll definitely want Contiguous checked here because if we select this peach color,
it's also going to get all the peach colors inside here, unless we have it checked.
So I'm going to click once, and you can see it did not get these little darker areas out here,
or any of the drop shadows. So I'm going to deselect with CMD D or CTRL D on a PC. And then
I'm going to change my tolerance to 50. And I'll select again. This time, it did a lot better. It's
selected everything out here. But now I can hold SHIFT and deselect some of these other areas. I'll
also want to get the interiors of these letters. So I'll SHIFT and click in each one of those too.
I'm going to CMD minus or CTRL minus to zoom out. And now I'll select the inverse. I'll go ahead and
make a mask on this, and this does pretty good, we can see that we have some of the PT areas
still showing up here, so we could go ahead and back up and contract our selection a little bit.
We could increase the tolerance even more. But I also want to show you how to change your mask
to get rid of these. So I'm going to zoom in really close right here on this leaf. I'm going
to make sure to have my mask area clicked over here, not the logo itself, but just the mask. And
then I'm going to get on my Brush tool. I'm going to open my general brushes and choose a hard round
brush. And then I'm going to make it smaller by holding CTRL and OPTION and dragging to the left.
That's CTRL ALT on a PC, I think. Okay, so let's just go over the edges of this. And what we're
doing is we're adding more black to our mask. Go ahead and make sure that you still have black here
and if you don't, just hit D on your keyboard, and then switch them so the black is in front. So we
can kind of click here and get rid of this peachy color on the green. If you have a straight line,
you can also hold SHIFT and fill in the mask that way too. If you're doing this with an actual logo,
be careful because you really don't want to change the logo itself. Okay, I'm going to zoom out and
this is looking pretty good. So we'll export this one too. File > Export > and Quick Export as PNG
and let's take a look at it. It looks pretty nice. I see that I can still do a little work around the
peachy type, but I think it's looking pretty nice. Now we can get really crazy with the selections
by working with levels and channels, but this is a more beginner level way to get rid of your
background. I might do a video later on that is a more advanced way to select and isolate things.
Alright, if you liked this video, I'm also out on TikTok,
and I'm putting short little tiny tutorials about Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop over there.
So if you want to take a look, I have a link in the description below. Alright, I'll see you next
week with another graphic design tutorial. Thank you!!!