sexta-feira, 1 de outubro de 2010

Remove Complex Backgrounds from Images in Photoshop

Remove Complex Backgrounds from Images in Photoshop: "

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While tools like the Magic Eraser can sometimes remove your backgrounds, the fact is you’re going to have to get your hands dirty with the eraser if you have images with complex backgrounds that need removing. While this can be time consuming, you can save yourself a lot of time with a little Photoshop wizardry. Let’s take a look.


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Right click your Background Layer in your Layers Palette, and choose “Layer from Background…” It automatically renames as Layer 0. Simply press OK.


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Your Layers Palette should only have a single layer, your newly unlocked “Layer 0.”


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Press L to select the Lasso Tool. Check your options on your Control Palette near the top of your Photoshop screen. Make sure that yours looks like this screenshot. Most importantly, be certain that “Anti-Alias” is turned off.


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Use your Lasso to draw a rough selection around your image. Don’t worry about being precise—we’re going to cut it out with more precision later.


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When your selection is done, press ctrl shift J to move your rough selection to a new layer with “Layer Via Cut.” You can safely delete “Layer 0” and work only in your new layer.


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Press e to bring up the eraser tool, or find it in your Toolbox.


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Visit your Control Palette again and set your “Mode” to “Pencil.” This ensures your eraser has a hard edge.


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Use the eraser to mouse around and delete the parts you don’t want. Get close to your image, but be careful when cutting into it.


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Keep in mind you can always undo with a swift ctrl z to undo or Ctrl alt z step back through your history(It’s like multiple levels of undo, in case you’re not familiar).


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You don’t need to remove every bit at this point. Once you’ve created a continuous gap around your image, we can start to remove the superfluous stuff you no longer need.


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Here’s where it gets a little advanced. You can simply use your eraser to remove the remainder of your image, but I don’t like spending more time on a routine task than I need to.


Hold Ctrl and click your “Layer 1.” This will load a selection around your entire roughly cut out image.


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Open the Channels Palette and click the icon new layer to create a new Alpha Channel.


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Select this Alpha Channel (likely “Alpha 1”) by clicking it. It also lists a shortcut to it. A simple ctrl 4 in an RGB file will jump right to it.


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Go to Edit > Fill and set your fill Dialog Box to “Use: White” like I show here and simply press OK.


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Your Alpha chanel should fill with white in the shape of your roughly cut out image. Press ctrl d to Deselect.


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Click and hold on the Gradient Tool to bring up the Contextual Menu. Pick the Paint Bucket Tool. Ensure your “Foreground Color” is Black.


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Simply click in the areas you don’t want to fill them with black. If any of your superfluous areas touch your image, it will fill as well, so be careful.


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Ctrl and Click on your Alpha 1 Channel to load the new selection you have just made.


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Press ctrl tilde to return to your RGB. The Tilde key is located to the left of your 1 ! on a USA keyboard.


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Return to your Layers Palette. Press ctrl shift J to move your selected image to a new layer. You can safely delete your old layer or simply choose to hide it.


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Your image is now precisely cut from your background.


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I usually click the adjustment layer to add a Color Fill style Adjustment Layer at the bottom of my Layers. This helps me check my work for halos and mistakes.


Image by Careyjamesbalboa via Wikipedia, in Public Domain.



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8 Awesome Websites to Take Free College Courses Online

8 Awesome Websites to Take Free College Courses Online: "

online college coursesWith rising costs associated with going to university, many progressive colleges have been looking for ways to teach those who can not afford a traditional college course, or otherwise do not have the time to visit a traditional classroom. The internet is a low-cost distribution method and is a perfect vehicle for learning topics with both textual, audio and visual cues to assist the student.

The sites below offer free online college level classes to anyone willing to spend the time on them. Each differ – some have all of the materials online and some may want you to purchase (borrow?) a textbook to follow along with. Each of them offers complete courses with only one thing missing: the credit for the coursework to put towards a matriculated degree.

MIT OpenCourseware

online college courses

Massachusetts Institute of Technology was a pioneer in offering online college courses and they still have the most diverse and in-depth collection of classes available anywhere. Their online offering is an archived version of real courses that have been taught at MIT, and you may need to purchase the textbook to follow along with the class. These courses come highly recommended.

Carnegie Mellon OpenLearning

online courses

Carnegie Mellon, based in Pittsburgh, PA, has a variety of courses available for anyone online. While the selection is not as great as MIT’s, many core courses are presented in an easy to follow online format. Their courses are similar to what a paying student would receive minus the course credit or access to an instructor.

Khan Acadamy

online courses

Salman Khan began putting videos on YouTube to help with tutoring a cousin. When he started receiving feedback that they were helping a lot more people than just his cousin, he realized he was on to something good.

Today, there are over 1000 videos on KhanAcademy, which is now a 501(c)(3) non-profit. Most videos are about math. However, there are also many other topics that he explores. Even Bill Gates has said that he uses Khan to teach his kids about math. These are not college courses per-se, but the math he introduces in them are at college level and many people praise them for being clearer and easier to comprehend than actual college courses!

University of California at Berkeley

online courses

UC Berkeley has put online videos and audio of many of its most popular courses up on their Webcast website. They do not include the text materials which can be very helpful for taking online college courses. However, you can still learn a lot by watching the videos of the lecures.

They have lectures for ongoing courses and also historical class archives on their website, as well as videos of recorded events and one-off lectures.

Stanford University iTunesU

free online college courses

Stanford has made many of their courses and lectures available via iTunes in iTunesU. This collection is great if you are on the go or want to listen to courses while commuting. They have an impressive collection of content available, all for free. The downside is that you need to use iTunes to view their content.

Tufts OpenCourseware

free online college courses

Tufts uses the OpenCourseware format to offer full content on a number of their programs. Worth mentioning from Tufts are their Medical and Dental school courses as well as selections from other courses.

Open University LearningSpace

free online college courses

Learningspace offers content from the Open University, based in the UK. This university pledges to be open and accepts many different kinds of students in its real world classrooms. It also opened up its content to anyone online. The online college courses are laid out extremely well and offer many different topics with skill levels going from beginner up to expert.

Johns Hopkins OpenCourseware

online college courses

Johns Hopkins is a respected medical school outside of Baltimore, Maryland. They offer a selection of courses from their school which would be of particular interest to medical students.

Get to work!

The sites above are free as in free beer. However, if you wish to make the most out of them you will still need to make the time commitment to sit down and watch or listen to the course content. You may not receive college credit for learning via these sites but you will definitely turn out a better person!

Image credit: Shutterstock


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quinta-feira, 30 de setembro de 2010

Two guys chatting on a party. nothing special.

Two guys chatting on a party. nothing special.: "
via http://www.zadan.nl/pics/party/
faved by Tealle"

Goo.gl Is A Go. The “Stablest, Most Secure, And Fastest URL Shortener On The Web”

Goo.gl Is A Go. The “Stablest, Most Secure, And Fastest URL Shortener On The Web”: "


Google’s URL shortener just opened up to the public, with a standalone site. Launched last December, Google’s Bit.ly competitor, Goo.gl can now be used for any links on the web. And Google promises that the shortener is the “stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web.”


From the blog post:


There are many shorteners out there with great features, so some people may wonder whether the world really needs yet another. As we said late last year, we built goo.gl with a focus on quality. With goo.gl, every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast, and it will keep working. You also know that when you click a goo.gl shortened URL, you’re protected against malware, phishing and spam using the same industry-leading technology we use in search and other products. Since our initial release, we’ve continued to invest in the core quality of the service:



Stability: We’ve had near 100% uptime since our initial launch, and we’ve worked behind the scenes to make goo.gl even stabler and more robust.

Security: We’ve added automatic spam detection based on the same type of filtering technology we use in Gmail.

Speed: We’ve more than doubled our speed in just over nine months.


The new URL shortener also comes with a host of interesting features. For example, if you sign-in to your Google Account, you’ll can access a list of URLs you’ve shortened in the past. And you can see the details the “details” link next to any of shortened URL, where you will find public, real-time analytics data, including traffic over time, top referrers, and visitor profiles.


There’s no API available…yet. But Goo.gl is available via extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Google says an upcoming API can be used to shorten URLs, expand URLs, and view analytics from directly within your own applications.


Twitter also released its URL shortener not too long ago, and Facebook is testing its offering as well. That being said, Bit.ly, the startup playing in the space, is seeing enormous traction despite all of these competitors.


More: Goo.gl’s Awesome Easter Egg To Instantly Turn Any Link Into A QR Code






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Feature: There is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly

Feature: There is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly: "







Twenty years ago, the fastest Internet backbone links were 1.5Mbps. Today we argue whether that's a fast enough minimum to connect home users. In 1993, 1.3 million machines were connected to the Internet. By this past summer, that number had risen to 769 million— and this only counts systems that have DNS names. The notion of a computer that is not connected to the Internet is patently absurd these days.




But all of this rapid progress is going to slow in the next few years. The Internet will soon be sailing in very rough seas, as it's about to run out of addresses, needing to be gutted and reconfigured for continued growth in the second half of the 2010s and beyond. Originally, the idea was that this upgrade would happen quietly in the background, but over the past few years, it has become clear that the change from the current Internet Protocol version 4, which is quickly running out of addresses, to the new version 6 will be quite a messy affair.


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