Tutorial: Make image background transparent in PS

Gary Eckstein General Technology 0 GIF, how to, JPEG, JPG, photoshop, PNG, tutorial

Something incredibly simple in Photoshop CS5 is removing the background colour of an image (i.e. making the background transparent).  These steps assume that you have a non-layered image that you’d like to work with (e.g. a .gif, .png or .jpg file).

There are however a few things you need to know in order to actually be able to delete the background/background-colour.

Important info for this tutorial

Before we start it’s important to keep a few things in mind:

1. A JPEG file cannot have a transparent background. We’ll need to save the final file as a PNG or GIF file.
2. We are going to need to create another layer in Photoshop in order to successfully remove the background colour.
3. There are other ways of deleting the background colour in Photoshop.

1. Open the image in Photoshop
2. Duplicate the Background layer (call it anything you want). One way of doing this is alternate clicking on the Background layer in the Layers window and then clicking ‘Duplicate Layer…’ .
3. Make the Background layer invisible (i.e. so that you only see the copied Background layer). To do this just click on the eye icon (Indicates Layer Visibility) next to the Background layer.
4. Select the ’Magic Wand Tool’. If you can’t see the ’Magic Wand Tool’ icon then alternate click on the ‘Quick Selection Tool’ icon.and you’ll see the ’Magic Wand Tool’ icon
5. Now click on the background colour. You’ll notice areas of ‘dashes’ e.g. 
6. Now just press Delete on your keyboard and the background colour will become transparent.
7. Save your file and remember to use PNG or GIF and make sure that ‘Transparency’ is selected when saving.