Photoshop HELP!
 

For some reason in the last few months when I take the background out of a picture and then place the picture somewhere else, it comes out choppy. WHY?

I'm just placing the picture onto a transparent pic...exiting the layer the pic is on to remove the background etc...and then saving as a gif. When I do, it just looks icky.


Sample

The picture on the top left is the one. In the flash. It happens with all the flash pics I do now a days and I don't know why. Any advice?

confirm that "anti-aliased" is turned on.

Thats what transparent gifs look like. Gifs don't retain semi-transparent pixels. They will always have hard edges.

Try saving it as a transparent png. OR Import it into flash and mask it out in there.

what I do is select the object being removed from bg, feather it by about 3-5 pixels, and contract by 1 pixel.

invert the selection and hit delete. you get a soft glow outlining the photo.

another option would be to set the default transparency color to the background color of your flash

:thumbsup

gif is not smooth at all - had same problem first time i did that - either do what it says up top - or easier is to make image on with the background

When "saving for web..." make sure the "matte" color on the right hand side matches the background color of the image behind it.

classy hosting site. like the design a lot :thumbsup

I've tried to make the background the same color as the flash...however somehow it never comes out the same color...you always see somewhat of a color difference and it just doesnt look good.

I don't remember it doing this, I could be wrong and maybe I am just now noticing but it's really getting on my nerves. I thought maybe I changed some setting I had in PS or something...no clue!

I tried the anti-aliased thing...and that just made the pic all dark. I'm not wonderful in photoshop, but I'm "okay". I just thought maybe it was a simple setting I somehow changed.

save it as a 24-bit .PNG ... this will make the file somewhat larger, but you won't have anymore problems.

Here's my steps:
1 - Select an appropriate background color in Photoshop (make DAMN SURE the 'Show Web Colors only' option is checked.

2 - Save the image in GIF format with 256 colors.

3 - Close and re-open the GIF, not PSD, and use the color sampler once again to find the background color.

4 - Import the color into Flash as the background color, as well as your GIF image.. they should match, as they usually do for me.

Yup. And put a #2 or #3 size bevel on it before you send it out of PS.