[Paul Benson]

Thanks for the confirmation. I would have been pleasantly surprised if PS supported these features and I hadn’t found them, yet.

Pauley

[Paul Benson]

It also sounds like you have extra space on your canvas that you don’t want to show up. Use the crop tool to resize your canvas to include just the image you want.

Pauley

[Paul Benson]

Even though the font scrolling works for me, I still use a simple font viewer (NexusFont on the PC) to see multiple fonts at once. I would think there would be something similar for the Mac – should use less resources than loading up Photoshop.

Pauley

[Paul Benson]

Just to be certain, you are clicking in the font drop down to make it the active control, correct? I have Windows, and as stated earlier, it does work, but you didn’t mention if you selected the control.

Pauley

[Paul Benson]

I also don’t see the gif. I see a ‘Welcome’ in the upper left, which looks like a brown sign with yellow text and an ‘under construction’ graphic to the right.

I just talked my brother in law through the creation of a gif with transparency (I have yet to do it myself). Essentially, he selected the areas he wanted to be transparent. The best tool for him was the magic wand, but Select-Color Range is usually one of the best methods. When he saved as gif, I believe there was an option to make the selected area transparent. Just make sure that ‘ring’ you are seeing is in the selection.

With that being said, expect to see a hard transition from transparent to opaque since gif does not support partial transparency. If you know the background image of your webpage, then you can use some color gradations to make the edge look less harsh.

Pauley

[Paul Benson]

Glad I could provide that ‘aha’ moment. Use Levels to move all the grays to white.

Pauley

[Paul Benson]

With today’s cameras I would imagine you have plenty of resolution so as to avoid pixelization.

First, I would make sure the picture is 300dpi. It is done through a dialog box, Image->Image Size, I believe. When you change the dpi, the dimensions will change for the image, but you are not losing any pixels.

If the image is exactly what you want, then you can use the same dialog box to set the dimensions and you should be done.

If not, next I would turn on the rulers to use as a reference, since the passport photo needs to be a specific size. If you know how to drag down guidelines from the rulers do that (it’s easy, just click in the ruler and drag into the document. A line should appear, but it will not be part of the true picture).

Then you should shrink the picture to fit into the correct dimensions. You can shrink it either by using the transform function (Ctrl-T) or using Image->Image Size. You can crop the picture if it makes it look better. The pixelization should not be a problem.

Pauley

[Paul Benson]

I think you are on the right track. It is called ‘Difference Keying’ in after effects, and it essentially looks at the differences in pixels.

Using the Difference blend mode, as you are, will give you black in the exact matches, and then shades of gray for those ‘partial’ matches. When you get that image, ‘Copy Merged’ and paste it into a new layer. Then use the levels adjustment to change all of the grays to white, leaving the black alone. That should provide the mask you want.

Pauley

[Paul Benson]

Crazy idea, and I’m not even sure it would work, but I think it could. Probably overkill, but if you have hundreds of these, it might save some time.

Make them an image sequence movie.
Bring into After Effects.
Use Motion Tracking on the three holes to stabilize.
Output stabilized movie as image sequence.

Pauley

[Paul Benson]

Thanks Jon. You all do a really good job on those.

Pauley