Topic awaiting preservation: Struggling and all alone

Although I'm not totally new to Photoshop, I confess that I have never used it to its full potential in the past. Now I find I'm beginning to need to explore more. So, please be gentle with me all you PS aces!

I'm working in PS 6.0 (I know, I know.... I plan to upgrade soon) and on a Mac.

I create illustrations by hand, scan them in, then bring them into PS for clean-up, cropping, sizing, color-correcting, etc. Most of these need to be in a format that will be imported into another application such as PageMaker or Macromedia FreeHand. However, when I do try to import the image, I get that annoying white box around it instead of a transparent background and I can't overlap other images or text.

What am I supposed to be doing?

It's all about file format.

You need to be saving the image in a file format that supprots transparency, and with the background parts transparent, and - of course - it needs to be in a file format that is supported by the program you are importing into.

I don't know anything about the other programs you are tlaking about, so I can't give any advice on what format might be best.

You'll also want to look in the Help files for 'clipping paths'

It may also just be the default canvas background color of the program. You may have to flip a preference for it to be transparent.

PageMaker???

I didn't know anyone still used PageMaker! Didn't Adobe discontinue it for InDesign about five years ago?

I haven't used PageMaker since the mid 1980s, but I'm pretty certain it's similar to Quark, FrameMaker, or Interleaf when importing images.

Convert the image to *.EPS format and include a clipping path. The clipping path is a path you draw around the outside edge of the image with Photshop and PageMaker will treat everything outside the path as transparent.

Since the image you're creating in Photoshop is a raster image, Freehand will expect it to be rectangular in shape. I don't remember if Freehand recognizes clipping paths or not. It might for *.EPS files.

Your best bet is to make the background of the image in Photoshop the same as the background you want to put the image on in PageMaker or Freehand, then when you import it, you won't need to worry as much with transparency.

Keep in mind that the image your creating in Photoshop is raster and PageMaker and Freehand are essentially vector programs and only have limited raster capabilities. Once you have imported the raster image, you will be limited as to the amount or manipulation you can do. It's best to get the image looking exactly as you want it in Photoshop. Then when you import it into one of the other programs you only want to adjust its position in the document in relation to the other elements in the document.

Freehand has layers so you can place the image on its own layer and you can place it in a frame in PageMaker and if I remember correctly you can overlap frames so the image can be behind text or other elements. If you import the clipping paths with the image, it could be placed over other elements in the document, but where it is not clipped, it will hide the other elements.

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-- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful.

Thanks, I'll try these suggestions. As for PageMaker.... I work for a school district and so far, they've been too cheap to buy me updated programs for quite awhile. I won't even tell you the versions of everything I'm using! I think I've finally convinced them, though to get with the program (Ahem...) and hopefully I'll soon have InDesign, new PS, new Illustrator. I'll probably have to learn everything all over again.