Photo refresher

[bwood]

I have not used brushes and photo cropping to be really good at this. I have a jpeg of a well defined person in front of background that is awful. I want to crop and cut the person out, or fill up a brush with a different color and make a nice long header. Back in my Macromedia days I would have used a magic lasso.
I need a step by step on this one. Thanks everyone for suggestions. I’ve included the picture. Apologies for the background.

[ss-kalm]

From Xara's HELP FILES:

Erasing backgrounds

This feature is particularly good for removing or changing the background behind complex shapes such as fur, hair, trees etc, that would be tedious, or impossible to mask manually. You only need to indicate the approximate areas to erase (with the Eraser tool) and the areas to protect (with the Mask Painter Tool), and then click the 'Erase background' button.

1. Use the Eraser Tool to roughly paint over the parts of the picture you want to erase (the background).
2. Select the Mask Painter Tool and paint over some of the parts of the foreground you want to keep.
3. Select the Eraser Tool again and then click on Erase background on the top InfoBar.

If the foreground is all a similar color you only need to cover part of it with the mask. If the foreground has differing colors, then paint the mask over each of the differing color areas. Use zoom (Ctrl+mouse wheel) to mask more or less detail and try not to mask over any background color or regions.


Make sure you don't cover any of the foreground in the background selection or vice versa. You don't need to be accurate, this is about as accurate as you need. Sometimes if you have a particularly messy background, you may have to be choosy on the colours/tones you select. If you get left with any artifacts, you can use the erase brush to erase them independently.

[bwood]

Awesome Keith. Thanks so much. I just couldn’t bear to freehand crop this entire thing.
I’d imagine this would work with logos that need clean cropping as well.
I’ve got a bunch of logos with a white background rather than a transparent background and it’s another problem.
Thanks again,
Bill

[Chris M]

Because this photo has a plain, solid background you could select the photo, then:

Select the 'Photo' tool > 'Select Colours To Enhance'
Click on the teal background (creates a red spot)
Right click the red spot and choose 'Make Transparent'

[bwood]

@chris m. Thanks Chris. Sounds great. I’ve also got some problems with some jpeg logos. On the front page for the 50/50 you’ll notice in the middle and on the right two jpeg logos that were sent to me via canva. Very blocky. Could I use the same process to make some of these backgrounds transparent, or at least do something with them. I get a lot of these homemade stuff sent to me, and sometimes at a loss what to do with them. Thanks Chris.

[Chris M]

The one's with the white squares for backgrounds? Sure. They are simple shapes though, I think I'd redraw them.

[ss-kalm]

Don't you think BACKGROUND ERASE is much easier than redrawing. I've always had very good results with the simple background erase. Although to be fair having a VECTOR logo is ALWAYS a MUCH better idea anyway!

[wizard509]

l think so.

[Egg Bramhill]

I prefer to trace with the Shape Tool first but secondly I like to use the Select Colours to Enhance method. I find the eraser tool very clumbsy.

[gwpriester]

Don't you think BACKGROUND ERASE is much easier than redrawing.

Before Xara added select colors to enhance, the erase tool was easier. But it required several steps as I remember and these days I do not remember very much. But I use the select colors to enhance almost daily, mostly to drop out a solid background and it works very well.