TalkRhubarb

Since switching to mac I’ve been looking for an easy way to edit photos to remove the background from images. Photoshop Elements has this ability, and it’s certainly possible with Gimp, but none of the other apps I’ve tried worked and that includes Seashore, Graphics Converter and a host of others.
So when I saw that Keynote ‘08 had an “instant alpha” function I got quite excited. I downloaded a trial version right away only to discover that while the instant alpha function works pretty well in Keynote, copying and pasting that into anything else just doesn’t work. You end up with either the whole image or a white background. Back to the drawing board.

Or maybe not. Ken Drake at KeynoteUser.com has a simple workaround:

Add a shape and set the fill to “none” in inspector.

Then copy both shape and picture and this preserves the transparency when it’s pasted.

To use the image on a webpage, I opened up iWeb, pasted the image into one of the drop zones and published the site to a folder. Opening that folder up in finder the image was called Droppedimage.png. You can then do with that as you please. Here’s on I made of my wife:

The original image is on Flickr here

UPDATE I submiited this hint to MacOSXhints.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Mac Rhubarb. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.