My friend Laleeta requested help with how to cut out partially transparent items from their background, quickly and easily, in order to composite the image onto a different background in Photoshop.
There are a number of ways to go about this. I recently had to deal with this very issue when I was making the vendor ads with a partially transparent skirt, and I found one way (limited to SL) that works very well, very quickly!
There are a few steps to this tutorial, and I went into extreme detail so that any skill level of Photoshopper can use this trick, but overall it’s very simple and basic. This should also work for gimp but I’m not sure of the exact commands on gimp. Any gimp users that can provide gimp translations, give a holler in the comments and I will add them to the post.
Here’s a finished example, one of my vendor ads, the original inspiration behind figuring out this work flow. Particularly vexing for me was that I wanted to add a shadow in Photoshop, so I needed a clean composite. I also wanted to add more shading/shadow to the background image but didn’t want any of that to be on the untouched product image.
The detailed steps with pictures after the cut –>
