Setting a transparent background

Images with a solid colour background look awful on a web page as they just do not blend in. A simple way to fix this is to set the background colour of the image to the same as the background colour of the web page. However this does not work all that well if the web page uses a pattern as its background - it can be done but its a bit fiddly. A better option is to convert the image to gif format as it supports transparent backgrounds.

Select the background colour with the magic wand (see right) then select the inverse i.e. the shape rather than the background colour. Copy and paste into a new image file with the background set to transparent, then save as a gif. The result is the second tree which blends into the page very effectively. If the file is already a gif then you may be able to achieve this by simply selecting the background colour and deleting it.

Photographs in jpeg format are usually fine in their squarish format but they too can be given the transparent treatment. As the background of a photo will consist of many colours it is a bit trickier to remove, depending on what the background is. If you are setting up a shot for this purpose chose a plain coloured object as the background to the shot. Using a combination of the magic wand and the eraser will achieve the desired result.

Then simply use the copy and paste method mentioned above and save as a gif. The resulting image may be a little grainy due to the limited colour pallette available to gifs but usually the result is worth the effort. This one was also converted to grayscale to give it an aged appearance.