Background of Clip Art

[MonnieM]

Is there an easy way to remove the grayish background from a piece of clip art? I have an old-fashioned baby buggy picture. Scanning this in gave me a gray square area behind the buggy. I want to get rid of this, but there are a lot of very detailed areas between the wheels, etc.

I was able to select the outside pretty easily and I used CTRL-X to get rid of it. Then I was able to select the very tiny areas between the wheels, etc. However, when I used CTRL-X, I got the background color (which I happened to have set at green - oh, no!). I guess I thought CTRL-X would just erase what I had selected (make it transparent).

Can anyone recommend the easiest way to accomplish this?

MonnieM

[Diana]

Hi Monnie,

Alt-double click on the background layer to make it Layer 0.

Use the Magic Wand Tool.

Try unchecking contiguous, which will select all pixels of that color in the image. If you have the same color gray in the image you want to keep, you may have to check contiguous. With contiguous checked, you will have to click to select each piece of background you want to delete. Set the tolerance around 10 to start, but you may need to adjust it up or down if it's selecting too many or too little shades. If your background is solid gray, you shouldn't have any trouble.

After clicking on the background with the Magic Wand Tool, press the Delete key.

If there are spots of background left, click with MW tool and delete.

If you want to save it with transparent background, File > Save As and set the format to PNG.

Hope this helps.

Diana

[MonnieM]

Thanks, Diana - this worked great. I did have to convert the original scanned files to something PS could use (they were originally Corel PhotoPaint files).

MonnieM

[Diana]

Glad it worked for you, Monnie.

Diana

[Priyanka Azad]

The option i find best is "magic extractor". Choose image -> Magic extractor, select the protect and remove areas and it does a very clean job for to in removing the unwanted areas.

~Pri