New Selection Tools in Leopard Preview
Selecting part of your image and masking your background to make it transparent is tricky business. Even with Photoshop.
Apple gave us some tools in Leopard that make a quick and dirty extraction pretty easy. There’s an Instant Alpha tool like the one in the iWork applications. But there’s also a nice Extract Shape tool that looks a lot like the one in Photoshop, minus all the fancy options.
You can make your web pages and other documents look a little more polished by adding transparency. The transparency opens up new possibilities, like subjects that pop out of their frames.
In the screencast, Murphy uses the Extract Shape tool to select a kitten in a photo and make the background transparent. The tool allows for further enhancement by dragging across colors you want to matte. This is similar to using the Instant Alpha tool that’s now included with Preview.
Here’s another example of what you can do.
Reminder from Murphy: Amazon is having a sale on Apple
12. December 2007 at 1:07 am :
wow, i never knew this haha, thanks for the info as usual. now we have quicklook there is no reason for apple not to build this into quite a strong app.
18. December 2007 at 11:44 pm :
I followed along with my test .jpg until the select dropdown menu. Mine doesn’t drop down. This is with an original .jpg from my canon digital rebel xti. I tried some other images (.jpg, .gif) and I can never get any options under the select menu. Tried on another 10.5.1 machine too and also didn’t work. Ideas?
19. December 2007 at 12:17 am :
Very nice! It’s definitely faster than opening up Photoshop.
It’s a shame that color adjustment of jpgs causes Preview to crash - that would’ve been another timesaver.
19. December 2007 at 12:55 am :
alan -
Did you try clicking and holding on the drop-down? I noticed when I was making the screencast that I had to hold for a split second before the menu would drop.
19. December 2007 at 5:38 am :
It depends on what you have open in Preview…If you have a PDF open it will not drop down the selection option. If you have a gif or png open it will allow this functionality. Cool.
13. January 2008 at 6:30 am :
“Having a large version of your image will probably help you select the borders more accurately”
It also means you don’t have to select them quite as accurately - since when you scale the cut-out images down, they will look much neater.
15. December 2008 at 5:32 pm :
hello,
great tips, thanks.
The question I have is regarding using the select tool in preview.
When I open my image in preview, when I use the rectangular option in select, I copy it and then paste it in powerpoint or word and it’s just fine. When I use the elliptical or even lasso option, when I do the copy and then paste, it comes into the application with black around the part of the image I selected so that it still forms a square.
I just want the area I selected…is there a way around this?
Thanks much!
Mike
16. December 2008 at 4:13 am :
This is quite a workaround, but it worked for me with Word:
Make an elliptical selection in Preview.
Copy To Clipboard
In Preview, select File, New From Clipboard
Save the newly created file as a png
In Word, select Insert, Picture, From File
Select the png you saved
For me that brought in just the round part, no black.