| 2. Make a layer from your background
layer by clicking Layer=>New=>layer from background.
3. Use the Magnetic lasso set to feather= 0 and uncheck anti alias. Click
in the outermost corners and innermost corners to get the best shape
approximation.
 4.
Click the "Add Layer Mask" tool at the bottom of the layers palette. Click
on the layer mask thumbnail on the layer to Make sure the masking icon is in
the grey box so that the mask is in the edit mode. Hit your D key to set the
default masking colors, white in foreground and black in background.
5. Paint on the mask with a hard 1, 3, or 5 pixel brush set to reveal areas
of the eagle that are no longer showing. Paint on the mask using black to
clean up are areas that are showing the background to hide these areas.
 6.
Right click on the mask thumbnail on this layer and select "Set Selection To
Layer Mask". This will select the white area on your mask.
 7.
Click on the image thumbnail to activate the image as the object to edit.
You will see a brush appear in the square between the eye and the image
thumbnail.
8. Select a # 3 or 1 brush. Use black to paint in the feathers of the
wingtips. Use white to paint the radiating lines out on the tail from the
body.
9. Click Select=> deselect.
10. Click Layer => Matting=> Remove white mask.
 11.
Click File=> Save for the web. Set the optimize palette to optimize your
image size with very little compromizes showing while minimizing your iamge
size. Here are the settings:
- GIF- graphic image format will allow us to save as transparent. You
may save as PNG also, however, not all browsers out there can see them. I
will wait 6 or more months till I see the older browsers are used less.
- Lossy = 0. Lossy is used to reduce file size. You can set the lossy up
if you wish to achieve lower sizes however, you do not want the loss to be
visible so you will want to monitor it.
- Color palette = Web will give you all web safe colors. Depending on
who you are designing for and the color range and depth of your image,
this could be changed to selective or adaptive. Web safe colors will
display with a dot on them in the color palette below. If you use Adaptive
or selective, you can use web snap to set a percentage of them to websafe
colors. this will help reduce some of the size of the image and how it is
perceived on a computer with limited colors
- Colors = Auto so photoshop selects the best, most often found colors
in the image. You may wish to set it to 256 and start deleting similar
colors. You can get the full pallete back by setting the image to jpg and
back to gif and upping the color depth.
- No Dither- dithering is used to get the best transitions in gradient
like images. This will help "smooth" the colors so you don't get sharp
edges between them, or zones. The pattern choice will set a distinct
pattern. The diffusion will be a more random placement so that a pattern
wont be discerned. Noise will be dotted in transition.
- Check Transparency. This will then save the image as a transparent
gif.
- Matte = none. this is used for selecting the color in which you will
be putting the image on , if you still have semi transparent or anti
aliased pixels in the image. The semi transparent pixels will turn to the
color of your matte, white, black, or a selected color. We should not have
any.
- No transparency box is where you decide what happens to the pixels
that are not 100% opaque, or have a transparency value but are not
transparent. In this project your pixels should be solid with no
transparency value. In other projects where this is not so, you may want
to select a form of dithering to transparent.
- Websnap will allow you to use selective or adaptive colors yet set a
percentage of them to a close approximation of the color in the websafe
color palette.
Now you can save any transparent gif and know about the fringes and
jaggies! |
