Last night, I had some design work to get finished before I could go to bed. It really didn't take long at all. But as I was sitting at my laptop, sipping my wine and listening for my kiddos to wake up, I started thinking about a time (not so long ago) when I was a clueless student, still learning. Ah, how I do not miss those days, but I am still learning. Everyday. It goes with the territory I'm afraid. My first love/hate relationship was with JPEGs... It's actually STILL going on. I used to feel like I could only save images as JPEGs. Then I started my photography class and learned about TIFFs, PDFs and PSDs. Life was good. I was making progress. Then I took a couple of design classes and was introduced to another file format, *.png. MIND. BLOWN. Here's why:
Say you want to make a logo for someone. You can choose to do it in either Illustrator or Photoshop (I always resort to Ps bc it's what I feel comfortable with and I already have to be in there anyways when I edit pictures... don't judge). You spend this amazing amount of time designing the perfect logo. You save it as a PSD so you can make changes, and then you compress the image and save it as a JPEG to email to your client or post on Facebook (...guilty...). They go to use it in an image and
WA-BAM!!! A WHITE FREAKING BACKGROUND!!! WTH?!?!?!?! Stop banging your head against the wall and put down the booze (at least until later). I am here to help you. Your first mistake was having a filled background, your second mistake was flattening the image... merge, people. always MERGE! lol. If you've already got a filled background layer and the rest of your design is on top layers, the easiest thing to do is add a layer right above your background layer, then double click the background layer, hit "ok", then delete it. Now you have a transparent background.
If you are starting from scratch, click File >New >Background >Transparent >Ok. It achieves the same end result. Make your design as normal, but when you go to save the file, click Layers > Merge Layers. That way your transparent background is still there and your whole design is still semi-flattened. You can also deselect the transparent background layer, click Layer > Merge Visible. By doing this, you'll notice that your design is still its own layer ABOVE the transparent background. Either option is fine.
From here, go to File > Save As > Format > PNG(*.png). Your design will still act like a JPEG, but no more white background... HURRAY!!!!!!!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment