Remove White plug-in

[Oceanwatcher]

There is a plug-in for Photoshop that is called Remove White and it is really useful sometimes. Most people that has used Photoshop for a while have heard about this plug-in, I guess. The problem is that the version I have only works on older versions of Photoshop. I am looking for one that work on CS.

Does anyone know this one, or does anyone know a substitute? I am not talking about a different way to remove a background like masking etc. I am talking about exactly the effect that this plug-in produce.

Hope someone can help here. It is one of the most useful plug-ins I know.

[Stroker]

If it's for PC, I can whip it out real quick. At least, I should be able to given the descriptions I've heard of it. Maybe add a few tweaks of my own.

PC?

edit:

Done for PC.
Filter > Tech Slop > Transparent Shades

No real error-checking, so if it gets wonky on ya, let me know.

[Oceanwatcher]

When I checked this forum today, I had to roll my jaw up from the floor!

This is WAY beyond what I expected!!! Thank you. I did a brief test and it seems it does exactly what it should.

I have been searching all over the internet for this. I am sure many people will be happy for this! I will be sure to advertise it :-)

THANK YOU!!!

P.S. Yes, I use PC.

[limaze]

Can you please explain what you are using this for? whats the usage of such a filter, any examples?

and what exactly does this filter do? i couldnt find a description of it on the internet. maybe you can explain


bye!

[Stroker]

You're welcome. But I must admit that I'm kind of surprised. First, I'm kind of suprised that I got it right from just the one little description that I could find about Remove White. Second, this can be done rather quick-n-sleazy using stock tools. I guess it just goes to show that different people have different flows.

If there really is a demand, I'll start a To Do List:
- Wiki node to describe and serve it up
- 16-bit support
- Proper Preview with selections
- Consider other methods of extrapolating the mask, like Lightness in Lab or Y.

In case Transparent Shades gets you into trouble, give Opacity Pump a whirl.

edit:

Limaze, I can explain it, but I can't really speak of uses.

The basic idea goes something like this:
- if pixel = white, then make pixel transparent
- if pixel = black, then make pixel opaque
- if pixel = shade of grey, then fade pixel appropriately

[Oceanwatcher]

A very typical use for this filter is to remove a white background from a logo with antialiased edge. That should make the edge gradually transparent. You can then place it over a new background completely intact without any weird edges.

Another good use is to lift a signature from a white background. Any writing with a pen is not perfect, so it would be way to complicated to try to mask it.

I would definitely love 16 bit and LAB. I prefer to do my corrections in 16 bit and LAB, so that would help a lot.

[Stroker]

Got up before the kids this morning and did some junk. Started the node, but still pretty bare. Added RGB 16-bit and proper Preview with selections. Even though I did the selection thing, Transparent Shades will totally ignore any transparency information already in the layer.

Transparent Shades

Doubt I'll add support for Lab 8-bit and Lab 16-bit.

[realaqu]

hi, Stroker,

Another great plugin, I did some experiments before to simulate that effect by hand in PHOTOSHOP, but never thought to make it as a plugin. you did great job.

here is my way. could be wrong, but the final result looks like the same.

1 make a new gray layer, what I meant gray here is form black to white,
R=G=B, like (100, 100, 100), 127 127 127 or 255 255 255, set the blending mode to difference

2 alt+ctrl+~ to select luminosity
3 turn off the gray layer and click the background
4 ctrl+j copy selected. turn off background layer, now you get the tranpsparent shades.

different gray value will get different result like in your plugin

because I did this before in my retouching work. so I usually put the transparent layer on top of the pure white to enhance skin if I want to make it lighter, or sometimes I just want to play with some pixels in a fixed range. say 100-157. my tutorial is from this method.


Realaqu.

[realaqu]

i just thought i can do that unclipping work using my method or the plugin

because the clipping area means the pixel value hit 255. so I use the picture in Ro's tutorial.

1 get the the selection when gray vallue is 255 255 255, save it in alpha channel1

2 set the 2nd gray value like 240 240 240, get another selection, saved in alpha channel2

3 run calculation command, the new selection=alpha1-alhpa2=clipped area.

4 play with levels to make the selected area lighter

5 load selection and add levels addjustment layer. set bleding mode to multiply and appy guassing blur on the mask to smooth the transition.

Realaqu

[Nanls]

Now if only someone could do this for mac. I used "eliminate white" filter, works on my PC, but not on Mac for CS...bummer. Does anyone know of any filter of the sorts for Mac?
Much appreciated.
~Nancy~

[Stroker]

Nan, the only place I can think of is Adobe's own User to User forums. You might get lucky and find a Mac-head willing to do it for you.

[Little Willie]

I have Mac's Remove white and Joe's Eliminate white and Eliminate black that I use a lot. They have different results and this morning I got to wondering what other remove white filters were out there. I have Cybia's alphaworks but really had not used them. They were stored on a cd. Found you and am now working with Transparent Shades. I like it.

Personally, what I use the eliminate white filters for is when I am working with photos to make them look like art work. I have Paint Shop Pro 7. A few years ago when I got my first scanner AdobePhotoDeluxe came with it. I use the colored pencil filter a lot, making sure I have white set as the background color. I remove the white from the layer. I also use Xero's lineart filter creating black lines on a white background and then remove the white. I put this layer on top. I love the looks I get from doing this kind of thing. I think I will continue to experiment with the different filters because they all seem to give me different results. Thanks for the Tansparent Shades.

[Stroker]

NP, Willie. Meow.

If anybody has any ideas for a PC/Win filter, I'm all ears. If I find it interesting in one form or another and I can do it, good chance I will.

[Kraellin]

stroker,

one of the biggest shortcomings of both psp and ps (from what i've seen in these forums), is selection and pulling images from a picture. vertus seems to have one for the macs and keeps saying they are coming out for one on the pc 'soon', but it's also quite expensive.

now, i can manually mask anything and make it a selection and pull the image, but the auto functions like magic wand just often dont do the trick without additional hand work. here's a good example of a recent post where selection is difficult because of bleeding and similar background colors and brightness as the foreground: http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/photo-compositing/11717-help-making-selection.html the faded tips of the palm trees, the bleeding over from the sky colors, the similar background/foreground all conspire to keep from making this a simple selection. it can be done, but takes a lot of convoluted actions to do it and even then isnt always satisfactory.

this is the one area of psp that i find the most lacking.... so far. i'm still reading the new manual for psp 10 and it would seem they've made some changes; something to do with multiple editing types on the same image, but i'm not quite there yet. and i also notice ps users have similar difficulties at times with selections.

i find it interesting that the human eye can see the differences well enough to know how it shld be edited for a selection, but that the computer programs cant seem to make the distinctions well enough without a lot of human intervention.

so, if you could crack that one...

Craig

[Stroker]

Ah, now that's a conundrum. It is something that I have been giving thought to for awhile. The problem at the very core is that humans see with comprehension while computers can only manipulate and extrapolate. The trick is in finding a medium between the two. How much human interaction and in what manner, and how much grunt work by the machine?

As far as selections go, this is the *exact* reason why I did 2D Histogram and 2D Remap. All I wanted to do is 'paint' a selection in a 2 dimensional manner. When I took these into the realm of RGB, I found lots more uses than just cool selection tricks.

I actually have a few unreleased filters that do other selection tricks. One defines a box in RGB space much in the same way that Select > Colour Range does in Lab space. I have another one that does a spheroid in RGB space. One of these days I'm going to look into meta-balls for some serious ChOps in 3d space.

If you can believe it, I do have another trick up my sleave. There is something that I was playing with last year and it was very promising. A rather flexible idea that can do some amazing things. I was blending two images together like no blending mode could ever dream of. I was creating procedural textures that tile in 4 dimensions. Could to amazing contrast tricks and fabulous desaturating things.

Simple idea, but hard to understand and control.

Now that I know a lot more about Filter Meister, I might have to give it a serious go from within Photoshop. As a matter of fact, with my recent fiddlings, I should be able to come up with a suitable interface.

A filter with lots of potential for making tricky selections is Evaluate by Richard Rosenman. Scroll down near the bottom: http://www.richardrosenman.com/photoshop.htm