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I am trying to edit an image I found online of a character. It was cropped, meaning it had a completely transparent background. So only the character was visible. I'd post the image, but I don't think it's appropriate to post here.

It's like this, though.

Clover

Only the image of the clover is visible, it basically has no background. It's hard to see since the sites background is white, put if you are confused as to what I am talking about, go to another website with a non white backgrounds (such as imgur) and put the image there to see what I'm talking about.

Anyway, whenever I paste the image from the internet to Photoshop, it ignores the transparency and gives it a black background with weird artifacting around the character. However, when I instead paste the image to Paint.net, the transparent background is preserved. So I decided I would just paste into Paint.net then into Photo shop, but that STILL doesn't work. When I paste an image with a transparent background to Photoshop from Paint.net, it's background is replaced with a white one. I can't even magic wand away to white or black, because it makes the image look weird after removing it.

If someone can please help me with this, or at least tell me why this is happening, it would very appreciated.

3 Answers 3

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That happens with Transparent .GIF and Transparent .PNG files.

What you need to do is actually save the .PNG file to your computer somewhere by right-clicking and choosing 'Save As' and then open it in Photoshop instead. Doing it this way will generally preserve the transparency.

I've never found an explanation as to why it works this way but if you copy and paste an image with transparency from a website Photoshop fills in the transparent section with black. Again, saving the file and then opening it will generally work to preserve it.

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  • Ah yes, this works perfectly. Thanks much my good man. Feb 6, 2014 at 5:06
  • @ConfusedGuy please mark answer if you're satisfied. helps us out of beta
    – Ryan
    Feb 6, 2014 at 10:58
  • More information than you probably wanted: stackoverflow.com/questions/12258519/…
    – horatio
    Feb 7, 2014 at 19:17
  • Yeah I use the same technique for now Feb 18, 2018 at 17:47
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First, check if your canvas's background is transparent. It might just be when you ctrl+C and Ctrl+N (open new document) in photoshop and Ctrl+V (paste to canvas), you create a new layer in the document

To reserve your transparency, go to layer panel and delete "background" layer. try this, if not working please show some screen shot so I can help you further. :)

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  • I had already tried that. I tried Ryan's method and it works for me. Thank you for trying to help me, though. Feb 6, 2014 at 5:04
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Also I recommend a browser plug in works perfectly. Right click the image and choose open with photoshop. There is a chrome version, too.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-with-photoshop/

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