How can I cut around this person accurately to leave?

Hi,

First of all, here is the picture I'm using:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20020405/mario05.jpg

I want to be able to take away all the white baackground and replace it with a transparent one. I've tried pasting the image on a transparent background, and then magic wanding and deleting the selcting of the background to leave the transparence behind it, but I still get lots of jaggied white edges around the character.

Any other way I can do this?

There are a number of ways to delete pixels on an image in Photoshop.

Since you are a beginner with such options, I suggest using a layer mask. If the picture is the background layer, double click it and turn it into a standard layer. If its already just a regular layer, then you can add a layer mask. On the layers palette, click the small icon that looks like a circle within a rectangle. Its the second icon from the left on the bottom of the layer palette.

This will create a layer mask.

Now, to remove pixels, switch to the brush tool. Notice that your options for coloring are now black and white. Black removes pixels and white brings them back. This way, you can basically draw to erase and if you screw up, you can use white to bring back pixels that were made transparent. You can also use just about any other tool on a mask to aide in cutting the image out. The polygonal lasso is a good beginners method to cut away pixels.


Now if you want the most advanced, clean, and sharp method of cutting out an image, you must use the pen tool that is located on the tool bar. You make points around the edges of the graphic. When you're done making points around the image, you can adjust them using the direct selection tool that is just above the pen tool. The "convert point" tool turns a point with straight lines into curved lines, and also converts curved lines to straight lines if you click directly on a point with a curve. Once finished, you create a selection from the path and cut or copy what you want. But I doubt you'll want to use this technique the first time you are doing this, as I'm certain you don't know much about using the pen tool yet.

For quickness you may also wish to try the magic wand tool with a tollerance of around 10 which will get rid of most of the background anyway then hit the quickmask tool and you should be just about there give or take a few pieces of retouching. I put an example below to see if thats the result your trying to acheive.

Hope this helps



Cheers

D.....

Once you get ole Mario yanked out of the background, you can do pretty much anything you want. It's all about making good selections...I made mine using the Magic Wand, cleaned up using QuickMask.

I never was able to locate the Pen Tool in ps7.
<--Begginner also.

There are several good selection tutorials here

http://www.teamphotoshop.com/photoshop/tutorials/ps_tut_tools.php

here a quik trick...

In order to prevent jaggy edges around you object (while using the magic wand), select as you normaly would... but before pressing the delete button do this

Go to the Selection menu, then select Feather, and use a value of one...

This will soften your selection edge (kind using blurr on the slection) and elminita jaggyness... Also if you paste you object over another the transition betwen the 2 will look more realistic...

Have fun....