My current header has characters leaning against a car. I need to take those characters out of the header, and place them on a different car. How would I go about doing that? It's impossible to draw around them, and crop them perfectly.......I'm definitely a newb in graphic design. The most I've done is resized an image, lol.
Cropping a rectangle is easy, but he's not cropping a rectangle. If you have photoshop, try using filter > extract to cut out the figures.
If you have the orginal psd file, it may be in layers making the job very easy. Otherwise the only way I know to do it to erase large blocks and then erase almost pixel by pixel around the image. Be sure to save work in progress frequently as a mistake is bound to happen sooner or later.
There is no need to do this in photoshop! That's what the extract feature is designed for. It will take you hours to get a perfect cut with an eraser!
i agree with colbyt, if u've psd its much easier to edit... but i dont know abt the extract tool, but i always use the pen tool to crop the image and i think its the best to crop the image.... coz u'll get the clear pic u want even with extract tool, the picture will not be so clear.... so i suggest u to use the pen tool thanks
IMO, extract will give you nothing more than a rough cut. For a quality image you will still be down at the pixel level before you are finished.
Either the pen tool or the polygonal lasso tool in Photoshop will be fine. I prefer the pen tool. As for HOW to do this, there is no shortage of tutorials on the web. Google it.
Please tell me you have photoshop, I pray you don't make this harder than it has to be. Saying that: You want to quick mask. If its a header and not tooooo much to "crop" as you say, even though you are wanting to select and extract, but we'll go with crop, you want to quick mask. Next on my prayer list is that you have some keyboard shortcuts under your belt, but if not, I am a patient man and will give you some key ones for this adventure. Once you have your image loaded, i want you to use this keyboard sequence. Q, D, B You have just gone to quick mask mode, set your colors back to default, and grabbed the brush tool. Thats why they call them short cuts. Black is on top so you will be making your selection using it. Use the brush to "paint" out what you want selected. You will have a red tint to your image in the selection area. If you paint outside your desired area, press... X X flips your colors from foreground to background, so you get your white on top. White in quick mask mode lets you "un-paint" an area, allowing you to get a very precise selection. When you have everything you want seleced in red, press Q Q a second time will exit quick mask mode and you will be faced with the marching ants as you would if you used a lasso and all that other goodness. If that area is what you want and you want a clean extraction, press Cmd J (Mac) or Ctrl J (PC) and you should notice you made a new layer from that selection. This is the easiest/most precise way to select and mask, hope it helps, but I am done typing now. PM me if you have questions. -Lee
you should post the image or a link to it so we can better see what you are dealing with. I'll take a whack at it if you want.