7 replies to this topic

[David_Lital]

Okay, I'm posting a request for a tutorial in which you remove white from a background that not only has color, but also has shades of gray that need to be transparent on a new layer.

What am I talking about? It's like this: a friend of mine is trying to make a custom skin for his fighter plane in his fighter plane simulation game. On the skin template image lies his cockpit skin, his engine, all that stuff that you can easy seperate from white by using color chooser and selecting white at 0% fuzziness. The problem is that the template also has the rivets, grooves, and shading that would be mapped across the hull of his plane. These parts are a slight gray on the white background, meaning that they would be slightly transparent if they were on a seperate layer.

Any idea on how to do this? My friend used to use GimpShop for stuff like this, and he had a way of doing it; after changing the image to RGB color, he had a command called "Color to Alpha" that would make take out the white background and preserve the transparencies of the shades, rivets and grooves of the skin template.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

[Scythar]

Erm... maybe,
but could you plz put a pic here, so i can SEE what you're talking about.

[David_Lital]

The white in the background, see, needs to be seperate from the shading, rivets, and grooves (the gray areas of the plane's wings and whatnot). This way, he can color behind those shades, rivets, and grooves quickly and easily without losing the quality of their opacity. Know what I mean?

[Scythar]

Try just to make a copy of that layer and boost the contrast, the grey will become darker making it more easy to select the parts you dont want. Then save the selection.
But do it on a copy, it's just a trial.

On the other hand, don't try to put too much effort in it: the models in games are usually low-poly, so small details will be lost anyway.

The method you used with color range almost worked for me: selecting white, but fussiness to 18%. I put a black background underneath it to see it more clearly.

So it depends a little on how detailed everything needs to be.

I am sure other ppl will find other and better methods.

[Dance]

When you have shades of gray like this, what i usualy do is i invert the image, go and select the blue channel in the chanels tab, go back to layers and then fill a new layer with black from the selection. That works just fine for all those lines there, trouble is it also takes all blue out of the other images. you have to make a new layer of your orginal picture and then delete the general area of the semitransparent lines from it. With your tool of choise, mask-eraser-lasso whatever.

Edited by Dance, 24 October 2006 - 07:52 PM.

[David_Lital]

Thank you very much. Dance, your idea worked perfectly; it's a crisp cutout of the wing's details. My friend thanks you a lot, and so do I.

[Scythar]

Yep, that method is def a good one i tried it out, and it worked.

Thx dance didnt know that one. Very nice !!

[Serval]

You can also set the blending options to Multiply in the layers window (does not work with background)
White will become transparent to every other color.
Other brighter colors will become bright to any darker color in layers to the back.
So again you have to preserve the machinery.

Older versions of PSP do not support these layer blending options. If your file needs to be compatible you better use a filter to remove the white.
http://www.simmerspaintshop.com/forums/dow...o=cat&id=11

Drop them into the Plug-in folder of Photoshop