This part of the tutorial is applicable only to photos with plain or one solid color background. The edges of the object or person in the picture that you want to retain should not be similar to the background color. If so, you may try part 2.
Let us start by choosing the photo you want to edit.
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Go to the layer tab found at the right side. The background layer is the image you opened. Right click on that layer and click the duplicate layer.
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A pop up window will appear. Name it as “object”. Now we have two similar layers with different names. Click the background layer and press the delete key in your keyboard. We only need the duplicate layer.
Then, Press Ctrl Shift N to create a new layer. Again, a pop-up window will appear, rename it as “transparent”. We have now the transparent layer and the object layer in the layer tab.
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What you need to do next is to simply drag the object layer up the transparent layer to switch the arrangement. It should look like this.
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Click the magic eraser tool in the tool bar found at the left side of your screen.
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Make sure that the object layer is selected or highlighted in blue in the layer tab. Let’s go back to the big picture. Click the white background of your photo. The white background should be erased turning into gray and white checkered pattern. The checkered background represents the transparent area.
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Now, we have to save the image in GIF to keep the background transparent. Press Ctrl Shift S to save as a different file. On the ‘Save As’ pop up window, write your desired file name and click the format drown down arrow and select CompuServe GIF (*GIF). Then, click save.
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We are done with the first part. If you don’t have a website to test the image, you can try it by inserting your GIF image in your Microsoft Word Document.
