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I am not an expert photoshop user but have been trying to use more of it in what I currently do.

I have a black and white image from which I am trying to remove all the white.

I cannot use the magic wand/delete because the white is in literally hundreds of places and in some cases very tiny.

Is there a method to strip the white off, leaving just the black?

Thanks in advance for your help.

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    There's A LOT of ways to do this but the best method will depend on the image. Post a screenshot of what you're working with and then we can point you in the right direction.
    – Ryan
    May 31, 2014 at 12:28

7 Answers 7

39

Indeed you should perform right selection.

Select->Color Range and click on the spot colored with color you want to select - you will see the change on the preview screen.

Also, you can choose the color from sampled colors drop down menu

Fuzziness should be set to 0.

If you press SHIFT while selecting (you can also click Shift and drag of the image) it will select all the spots with the same color....

After selection was made you can perform on it any action you want...

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  • if you want to remove the white background around your picture but without removing the white spot inside your picture: set your layer to invisible (uncheck the eye), and remove the selection you want to keep by pressing alt (-)
    – JinSnow
    Jul 13, 2015 at 10:18
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The easiest way you can do this is by unchecking the contiguous (marked yellow in screenshot) location when selecting the white colour with magic wand. This will select only those areas which you want. To get exact colour or colour range you can set the Tolerance as per your image.

Here is an screenshot with my imaginary image.

enter image description here

enter image description here

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3

Go to eraser tool, long press, and click magic eraser tool. and then click on the region that you want to erase step2

and below is the final touch i have made to my picture. I erase all the white region of the picture and then I just save as png. after

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Method

Last item on coloumn to the right.

Also. Method 2 will involve blending and experimenting. if you are looking to increase the complexity of your images - this is a great starting points for viariants

enter image description here

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The quickest option I would use if you are only removing white background, is on the layers panel, create a new layer under your image with the desired background colour / photo etc. then on the layer you are trying to remove the white from, select the option "multiply" from the dropdown next to the opacity %.

similarly "screen" will do the same thing for Black in the image.

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  • Unfortunately you can use this method to take out a color to save as transparency.
    – Hanna
    Jun 5, 2015 at 17:10
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If you just want transparency where the white is, you don't need Photoshop. This is a very simple thing to do in PowerPoint... 1. Paste the image into PowerPoint 2. Select the image 3. Hit the Format tab 4. Click Color 5. Click Set Transparent Color 6. Click on one of the white areas you want to remove. 7. Right click the image and Save as Picture.

Of course, this will only remove one color, so if there are shades of grey in your white, this is NOT a solution.

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    Sorry, but Powerpoint is not a tool to prepare good images, it is a tool to create style sheets. To create or change images one should only use programs prepared to do that, like gimp, photoshop, illustrator (vector graphics), Corel Draw etc.
    – Mensch
    Jan 7, 2015 at 7:43
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    Actually, Kurt, PowerPoint 2010 has some very powerful image manipulation tools, and it is less intimidating than Photoshop. For many users, the changes you can make to images in PowerPoint may be good enough for what is needed. Feb 24, 2015 at 22:16
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This video might help you!

Steps shown in video:

  1. Create a new layer,
  2. Create clipping mask over the layer on which color is to be removed
  3. Switch blending mode of new layer to color (3rd last)
  4. Paint with care (Resampling again and again for color tones)
  5. Done!
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  • Hi Hash Tang, welcome to GDSE and thanks for your answer. If you have any questions, please see the help center or ping one of us in Graphic Design Chat once your reputation is sufficient (20). Keep contributing and enjoy the site!
    – Vincent
    May 15, 2015 at 13:33

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