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Participant
February 1, 2014
Question

Perfectly removing a white background

  • February 1, 2014
  • 5 replies
  • 21425 views

This might help someone else.  I am also writing this so I remember it.  This procedure makes a flat photoshop document with all white removed as if the document were a layer with blend type "Multiply".  You can then paint white behind it to make non-translucent sections for overlaying with other things (in other programs or web stuff), but the edges will be perfect with no loss of detail.

  1. Open the doc (RGB mode only)
  2. Make a new layer, fill it with full red.  Invert it (Cmd-i).It'll go cyan.
  3. Make a layer, fill it with green.  Invert it, so it goes magenta.
  4. Make another layer, fill with blue, invert to make yellow.
  5. Turn off the new layers so you can only see your original.
  6. Go to the channels palette.
  7. Create three new blank channels. They'll be black.
  8. Command-click the Red channel.  This will make a selection.  Change to your first new channel, and fill that selection with white.
  9. Do the same thing for the green channel, into your second new custom channel.
  10. Do the same for the blue channel, into the third custom one.
  11. Control click your first custom channel (with the selection from the red layer). Invert the selection (command-shift-i). Go to your new red layer (which is now cyan), and apply the selection as a mask (by clicking the mask button).
  12. Do again using custom channel 2, onto the new Green (changed to Magenta) layer.
  13. And again, from channel 3, into the Blue (now Yellow) layer.
  14. Set all 3 of your layers to blend type "Multiply"
  15. Turn off any other layers.

Done.  If you need to, make a new layer under, and paint white to make any sections you want opaque.

    5 replies

    Participating Frequently
    October 30, 2020

    Utterly works, perfectly! Thank you so much

    Participating Frequently
    October 25, 2020

    Superb thank you!

    Participating Frequently
    October 23, 2020

    Simple but effective.  Great advice, thank you

    sleeps2dream
    Participant
    November 9, 2016

    Thank you so much for taking the time to write detailed instructions which were easy to follow.  The steps worked perfectly and I get to keep my eyesight! 

    JJMack
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    February 1, 2014

    Reading your steps I would think that step 11 the Ctrl+Shift+I invert would pop up a message that no pixels were selected. for the Ctrl+Clicking the Alpha  channels should select all pixels since all were filled with white. If your original new documwnt had a white background. For the Red. Green and Blue channels would be all white.

    JJMack
    Participant
    February 1, 2014

    Hi JJMack.  Thanks for the comment.  Perhaps I should have more clearly stated in step 1 that you should open a document containing an image with a white background, from which you would like to drop all the white.  AT the completion of the process, your document should look something like this....

    JJMack
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    February 3, 2014

    If you want the actions I created you can download then here. I use a script in a couple so I included it in the zip file. I failed to post the link yesterday there was a problem on my web host service,

    http://www.mouseprints.net/old/dpr/KillWhiteActions.zip

    JJMack