[Stephanie Barnard]

Ok, I'm working on making and scanning some embellishments and such, and I want the background to be transparent...how do I do this?

I use Digital Image Pro.

Thanks for any help, or any links I can check out!

Hugs,
Stephanie

[talina]

I don't use DIP, but I'd imagine you could use your selection tool to select your unwanted background and delete it. Then you could save as a transparent .png file. I hope someone who uses DIP can be of more help. Have fun!

[Betsy]

.png files preserve transparency for saved files, whereas a tif or jpeg adds a white background.

When you are scanning (And of course, be careful about copyright laws!), use a piece of cardstock behind your item in a sharply contrasting color. For example, if I were scanning a handful of white/light colored buttons, I'd arrange them all face down on the glass, then put a black piece of cardstock over them, then close the cover. If you have something too lumpy or too intricately-arranged to put the cover down, try a dark (solid colored) towel.

I don't use DIP, so here's where our terminology might begin to differ.

Once the item is scanned, you can use the Select>Color Range option to select the black of your scanned cardstock. Just delete, and you should get a transparent background.

If you get a background color (from your Tools Palette) instead of transparent, you need to duplicate the original layer and delete the locked Background layer before doing the Color Select step.


HTH!

[Pixel Lady]

One more tip, .gif also preserves transparency.

Michelle

[cfordrun]

Unfortunately, though, a gif only has an 8 bit channel for preserving transparentcy, so you'll get a little "halo" of the matte color on the edges of your image. PNGs have a 24 bit transparency channel option, which is fully transparent.

[Betsy]

.png seems to be the standard for saving elements in the digital scrapping world.

[tnscrappn]

I am selecting and copying to clipboard a part of a pdf file into a word document. My problem is I can't make the background transparent with the little transparent pen tool. Is there another way to do this? Thanks in advance for any help!

[Betsy]

I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to do. Can you elaborate?

You may not be able to make a .pdf file transparent. The files were talking about in this thread were .png files, which can support transparency. I'm not sure .pdf files CAN be transparent.