Technology Tip Tuesday

August 21, 2012

For my technology tip, I am going to help all you Mac users with a simple trick that I’ve found to erase a white box from a JPEG image. When I am creating resources, I often don’t want this box around the images. It just gets in the way. So here’s how you get rid of it:

See that box around the image below. It just doesn’t work sometimes.

For this to work, you must be in Pages or Keynote. If you don’t have Pages or Keynote on your Mac, you should. I love them so much more than Word or Powerpoint.

(1) To begin, click on the JPEG image within Pages or Keynote so the little boxes on the corners show up.

(2) Go up to Format on the Menu bar and click on Instant Alpha.

 When you click on Instant Alpha, this little box will appear.

 (3) Hold down SHIFT as you click and this will keep the Instant Alpha active if you need to get rid of more than one white area.

 If you can see this image has several white areas so I have to keep holding down SHIFT to get rid of all of them.

 Viola! You have gotten rid of the white background.
Click the X in the box and you are out of Instant Alpha.

If you notice, the image has a little bit left of white around the edges. I can click on the image again and go to Instant Alpha again to get rid of these areas.

 The little white box will show up again. The gray directions box did not show up but you can still do Instant Alpha as long as you see the white frame from what you already removed.

Click on those little areas and you have an image without the white background.

Looks much better now!
Here’s one more tip, if you accidentally change a color you don’t want to change, just go up to the Edit menu and click on Remove Instant Alpha. 
Hope this helps friends! Check out Katie’s linky party for more techy tips.

8 Comments on “Technology Tip Tuesday

  1. Brilliant!! I had no idea that was possible to do.
    Now how do you get the patterned background to fill the page ??:)

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