From HelpWiki

What Are They?

Personalized pictures are graphics that you make yourself. Usually you find several images that you like and merge them into one. Be aware that you cannot use copyrighted materials without permission. If you have an image that you want to edit online then try using Pixlr or Picnik.

Cropping Out A Picture's Background Tutorial

Software Requirements

You'll need a copy of photoshop. This tutorial uses photoshop version 7.0 but you should be able to follow this tutorial if you have version 5.0 or up. The tools or windows may be in a different position but otherwise they're the same.

Setting Up

1) Open photoshop.

2) Right click on the picture of this carousel horse.

It's a picture I took myself so you're free to use it as you want it.

To save the picture to your computer make, right click on it and select save image as from the menu that pops up.

3) Load the image into photoshop by going to File > Open > then navigate to where you saved the file.



4) There are a few windows you want visible in photoshop before you start to help get things going. You should be able to see your tools window, history window, paths window, and layers window. If all of these aren't visible then go ahead and make them visible. To open a window go to File > Windows > and then click on the window you want to display. Below you'll see a picture of all the windows I have visible on my photoshop screen.

So then this is what my workspace looks like:



5) There's one more thing you need to do before we're ready to start cropping. By default photoshop locks the photos background layer when it's loaded. This may not be true in the newer versions of photoshop but you'll need to check and make sure. You can tell if the layer is locked if it has this symbol on it which I've circled in red:



If you have a layer that is locked you'll need to unlock it to start working on it. First you'll need to select the layer you want to unlock. Then go to Layer > New > Layer From Background.

After you've selected the new layer from background you'll get a popup box that looks like this:



You can go ahead and click okay to whatever default values it has there.

Once you've unlocked the layer the little lock icon will disappear and the layer should be renamed to something like Layer 0 although the number may be different if you've made any additional layers after opening the photo.



Now, after all that, you're ready to start cropping the background out of the photo.

Background Cropping

A lot of people I talk to tell me they use the lasso tool to crop the background out of an image. If you're anything like me, you scoff at that method because it doesn't give you the amount of control over the shape that you'd like. Well there is a solution and you're going to love it.

1) From the tools menu, select the pen tool.



2) Like most of the tools in photoshop, they have a multitude of options. At the top of the screen, under the file menu, you'll see the settings for the pen tool. If you don't see these settings then make sure you have options window open. To display that window go to window > options and click on it. Make sure your options are the same as these:

If you don't have these options selected you won't get the results you're looking for as you crop out this picture.

3) Make sure the window with the carousel horse is selected (the blue title bar should be a brighter blue then any other windows you may have open). Now, you're going to select a point on the horse and trace around the entire shape of the horse. I picked the leg to start but it doesn't matter where you decide to begin working.

It should start to look something like this:



Now the closer you get to the shape of the horse the better it will remove the background. However sometimes its hard to see where the horse stops and the background begins. To help you zoom in on the section of the photo you're working on by selecting the zoom tool:

And you'll see the horse and the path you're creating like this:



One thing you may notice as you trace around the outline of the horse is that you accidentally put one of the path boxes too far away from the horse. You can fix these one of two ways. The easiest way is to undo the use of the pen tool. There are several ways to do this:

• Go to the history window, select the last path tool item on the list, and drag and drop it on the trash can icon in the bottom of the screen. Selecting the last path tool item from the list and hitting the delete key on the keyboard will have the same effect
  
  
  • 
    
• Use your keyboard shortcuts to undo what you just did. Click on Ctrl + Z
  
• Go to Edit > Undo at the top menu on the photoshop window.
  

The alternative way to fix a mistake you've made is to use a different tool on the tools window to select the point in the path that's gone out of the way and drag it back into place. To do that go to the tool bar and select the direct selection tool.



4) Using the path tool, continue tracing the outline of the horse until you have a solid line around its shape. If at any time you switch to another tool to edit the path or delete a new path section, you'll need to click on the last path item left to continue building the path, otherwise you may end up with a strange shape. When you get back to the beginning of the path you started you need to connect the end of the path to the beginning so you get one solid path all the way around.

Here you can see the path is nearly closed. Once it is you'll get something like this:



5) Now that you have a path all the way around the horse we're ready to get rid of the background! Go to your paths window and find the path to selection icon and click it (circled in red).



Once you hit this it will turn the path around the horse into a series of dotted lines. That's exactly what you want!

6) There's only one more thing left to do. Right now we have the entire carousel horse image selected. If we were to try and delete the area we have selected then we would delete the picture we want. So, we have to invert our selection area.

Go to Select > Inverse.



This will change your selection path to look like this:



You'll notice that we have an addition dotted lines around the entire picture. That's exactly what we want.

8) Hit the backspace key on your keyboard or go to edit > clear. This will remove the background around the horse leaving you with this:



Now the horse has gray and white boxes behind it. That's perfect. That means there is no background behind the horse. There is one problem with the horse though. There's a section between its back leg and its tail that still has some of the background left. Using what you've learned, try and delete that area.

Your completely cropped image should look like this with the space between the tail and back leg showing up as transparent as well:



9) Okay! Your picture is completely cropped. It's time to save it. Go to File > Save For Web and then you can decide if you want to save it as a .gif or .jpg or leave it completely transparent by saving it as a .png.

10) Here's the finished cropped photo in several different file formats for you to enjoy and use them as you like.



JPEG, white background



GIF, white matte



PNG, completely transparent