Deleting selections to get a transparant background

[richrdstone]

You guys have been a lot of help in my other thread,  but now I have another question.

In my project, I selected around the lady on the bike and did editor / delete  and got transparency which I wanted.

I wanted to try the same thing with a different pic, but instead of transparency, I get a white background.  what did I do different?

[Sepiana]

richrdstone,

Try this . . .

1. Make your selection.
2. Place your selection on its own layer (Ctrl-J).
3. Turn off the visibility of the Background layer (or delete this layer).
4. Save your file as PSD, TIFF, or PNG to preserve background transparency. 

[BuckSkin]

A few more ways to achieve transparency:

(Control + J) will create a new layer with the selected area intact and everything else transparent.

Pressing either Backspace or Delete will make the selected area disappear to transparency.

[fotofrank]

Pressing either Backspace or Delete will NOT make the selected area disappear to a transparency on the background layer. It will fill the selected area with the background color. The Background layer cannot have transparent pixels.

A simple test:
Create a new file with a transparent background - is it a Background layer or Layer?
Now flatten the layer - it is now a background layer that is filled with the background color.

[BuckSkin]

Jul 27, 2021 20:06:04 GMT fotofrank said:

Pressing either Backspace or Delete will NOT make the selected area disappear to a transparency on the background layer. It will fill the selected area with the background color. The Background layer cannot have transparent pixels.

A simple test:
Create a new file with a transparent background - is it a Background layer or Layer?
Now flatten the layer - it is now a background layer that is filled with the background color.

I did not know that about the Background layer changing to background color; I always do such things on layers; I did know that one cannot make a jpeg Background transparent.

I use PNG instead of jpeg when I want to preserve transparency in the finished product.