alpha skills - free tutorials around selections, masks and other digital disasters

Alpha Skills Lesson #4
Extracting a Simple Logo
from a Complex Background
when few colors are involved over a color-rich photograph, color gradient or complex rendered background image

part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4 - part 5

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The bottom text shows significant white gaps between the seam which separates the inner blue and outer green portions.

One way to attempt to fill them is very tedious: click each of the white areas, one by one. Some are just 1 pixel in size - this could take forever.

A better way is to allow the flood fill tool to 'spread' beyond the exact color that was piked, and make it seek neighboring pixels even if they divert from the baseline color.

Check the Antialias box.

Select the blue color with the color picker as earlier.

Then pick the blue inner part if the 'g' circle.

With Antialiasing enabled, the blue color will spread slightly beyond the current range and into the white and some green area surrounding it. The blue region will essentially 'grow' a little.

There are a few light blue dots still, very likely. Just click the same inner blue area once more, and it will further grow - white pixels are now gone.

You can now see that there are newly introduced colors, i.e. a few shades of blue-green along the region separating the blue and the green.

You can do the same with the other ovals in the letter 'g'

A similar set of steps and approach can be used for the other letters that still show some white gaps. Note that you could also choose either between growing the inner green letter or expanding the outer blue regions around them. Either way the white gaps will disappear. Here is an example of a possible result:

If you're interested in comparing notes with your own experimentation, feel fre to download the folowwing file(s):

extracted_logo-tga.zip (8 kb)
extracted_logo.tga (900 kb)

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next: beyond the magic wand: other selection tools
and later: painting on alpha, adjusting alpha, expanding or shrinking and many more tools.

part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4 - part 5