How To Change The Background Color Of A Picture In Illustrator

Undoing the evil human activity of flattening a vector graphic, one JPG at a time.

This tutorial will teach you an effective method for isolating graphics such every bit logos and icons from white backgrounds. We essentially utilise the graphic to mask itself off from the groundwork. Information technology is always preferable to go the original graphics if possible, but for those situations where a flat image is all you take, this technique may simply save the day.

Preview

Here is a quick preview of what you can wait from using this technique, the image on the left is a flattened JPG file with no transparency layers. The right side is the same image later using the technique in this tutorial.

Step 1

The first pace is to open your image in Photoshop. I am using a logo from this set on Medialoot.

At present of course, the bodily logo template is completely vector, only in this hypothetical situation we are going to pretend that some deranged lunatic has flattened the logo into a JPG and deleted the original file from existence (the horror!).

Footstep 2

Double click on the background layer to unlock it, and and so create a new Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer.

Step 3

Open the Properties window and turn the Saturation all the way downward to -100 on the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.

Stride four

Add together a new Invert aligning layer.

Stride 5

Add a new Levels aligning layer, and in the Properties window adjust the highlights input value until the areas that you want to be 100% opacity are #FFFFFF (yous tin can employ the centre dropper tool to bank check what colour individual pixels are).

The background should already be #000000 if it was pure white to begin with.If it isn't then you lot will as well demand to accommodate the shadows input level.

Step vi

Printing CMD/CTRL+A to select all, and the CMD/CTRL+SHIFT+C to Re-create Merged.

Step 7

Click the layer visibility icon on all 3 adjustment layers and select the original layer again. Press the Add together layer mask button at the lesser go the Layers window.

Footstep viii

Open the Channels window (Window > Channels) and click the layer visibility icon on the newly created Mask channel. Then press CMD/CTRL+Five to paste the image into the mask.

Step nine

Click the layer visibility icon on the Mask channel again to turn off the cherry-red overlay and see the results.

Pace 10

This is actually looking pretty skilful now, especially on transparent and lighter colored backgrounds. Just something unexpected happens on darker backgrounds. The edges get very rough looking and unpleasant looking.

Step 11

Luckily at that place is a simple fix.

Press CMD/CTRL+Thousand to group the masked layer and then with the group select ALT+LEFT CLICK on the mask layer icon to create a selection.

Step 13

Become to Select > Modify > Contract... and enter the one pixels then click OK.

On high resolution images y'all may need to increase this to two pixels or more merely information technology'south best to try the smallest possible value first to avoid unnecessary masking.

Footstep 14

Click theAdd new mask button once more to create a new mask on the grouping layer. The issue are much amend this time around on both light and dark backgrounds.

Step 15

With that being said, it unlikely we would ever want to use such a night text color on a dark background anyway. Just I wanted to share the additional steps for smoothing out the edges only in case.

Here I selected the grayness elements of the blueprint with the marquee tool and Inverted them with an aligning, and as well used a Levels adjustment layer to brand the gray elements white instead.

Issue

And hither is the result. We accept gone from a completely flattened JPG image to a versatile transparent logo that works on both light and dark backgrounds. Just exist sure not to salvage information technology as a JPG again .

Source: https://we.graphics/blog/how-to-change-a-white-background-to-transparent-with-photoshop/

Posted by: rosasfroopped.blogspot.com