[How-To] Remove Background Colors

Ok, ladies and gents I'm going to be showing you guys how to get rid of white backgrounds from FULL sprite sheets.

Like this!

Dark Sonic Sprite Sheet
(If the above link doesn't work, click it again then highlight the address bar and press enter.)

What you will need
- Paint.NET
- Sprite Sheet (duh)
- Half a brain =D

NOTE: For the sake of simplicity I will be using this Dark Sonic Sprite Sheet as an example. This works with any other sprite sheet with and without a white background.


Ok, so usually when you come across an awesome sprite sheet like the one above you wanna use it some animation or something. But there's a problem...as you can see from the picture above, the background is white.

My Point?

Let's say you have this Dark Sonic Sprite Sheet and open it in Fireworks. Now usually the best thing to do would be to get rid of the background in Fireworks then paste into Flash and continue your animation. Well, let's choose our Magic Wand tool. Then lets right click the background and choose the Select Similar option. As you can see, the eyes and gloves of Dark Sonic are selected and if you were to press the delete button, then Dark Sonic would have transparent eyes and transparent gloves, which is what we do not want.



So how do we get rid of the background without getting rid Dark Sonic's eyes and gloves?

Simple. Paint.NET. With Paint.NET you will be able to get rid of the white background on Dark Sonic's sprite sheet without deleting his eyes or gloves.

Ok, so what you're gonna do is open Paint.Net and choose the Dark Sonic sprite sheet.



Next, You're going to want to choose the Magic Wand tool. If you look at the top part of the window you'll see the settings for the Magic Wand. By default, the settings should look like this:



Change the Flood Settings to Global and change the Tolerance to 0%.



Now all you need to do is select the white background on the Dark Sonic Sprite Sheet and after it is highlighted press the delete button on your keyboard. Now you'll see that Dark Sonic does not have transparent eyes or transparent gloves! =D



I'm sure there are other ways to do this technique but the only way I know how to do this is through Paint.NET.

Also, important, you will need to save your image as a png. Gif also works but is not recommended. Other formats do not support transparency or have compatibility/compression problems.

You can get Paint.Net here, btw. Paint.NET

Y'all Welcome! =]

fix the spoiler pic, broken link

Granadico wrote:fix the spoiler pic, broken link

Say what?? I can still see the pic...hold on I'll try to do something...

the mystical forest zone pics can't be img'ed.heres link:
http://www.themysticalforestzone.com/sprites_2007_Damien/SONIC_archives/Sonic_battle_darkform.png
press adress bar and press enter when you get there.

narutoall76 wrote:the mystical forest zone pics can't be img'ed.heres link:
http://www.themysticalforestzone.com/sprites_2007_Damien/SONIC_archives/Sonic_battle_darkform.png
press adress bar and press enter when you get there.

Thank You Mr. Narutoall cuz I had no idea...

lmfao. I hate when spriters use a white background xD.

thank you so much this problem pissed me off so much till now thanks again

Nice tutorial man :)

XD i revamped the sheet that way because of that.
I changed the BG color and the pallete as well as Added alot more poses.

I'll get to posting it one day.
But good job man. Paint.net is my bffl

Having white backgrounds use to piss me off ALL the time. Then one day I was messing around on Paint.NET and accidentally found out this nifty trick out.

you can use the same trick to recolor an entire sheet in less than two seconds.
keep the opacity thing at like 10. and just color and it will color everything thats the same color at once.

Mistah_Jayden wrote:you can use the same trick to recolor an entire sheet in less than two seconds.
keep the opacity thing at like 10. and just color and it will color everything thats the same color at once.

That is epic!!

I already knew about this.


Rapid. Why the fuck didn't I post a tutorial about this common problem?


Why Rapid?

BEcause you over look things >_>

Renny wrote:BEcause you over look things >_>

What the fu-...

Thank you Renny.

You're welcome :)

Pingboy wrote:I already knew about this.


Rapid. Why the fuck didn't I post a tutorial about this common problem?


Why Rapid?

Bc you watch that gay-ass adventure time cartoon

So can this be done with any other program?

I'm pretty sure Photoshop can do this but idk...

well i think photoshop is better than paint.NET, so i'm pretty sure. he prob just used/had P.NET

Granadico wrote:well i think photoshop is better than paint.NET, so i'm pretty sure. he prob just used/had P.NET

"He" as in me?

forgot you were the OP lol

Fireworks is better. That's about it...

Well I finally finished deleting everyone's unbelievably fucking stupid and highly irrelevant posts. What the fuck is wrong with you people?

This is a good tutorial, albeit being an extremely obvious process.
You can also just hold shift+click to change the selection mode to global, without toggling the button.

I'm also changing this topic's title because this is a method to remove any background color. Not just white. I don't understand why you would post it as "removing white backgrounds" when it converts all colors to alpha. Why. Why mislead these poor, already misguided souls.

The same can be done in Photoshop, but I believe its a more painful procedure. Then again I haven't used it since CS2, who knows what's different. I suggest everyone stop using it anyway and switch to Paint.net and Gimp. Both you and your computer's memory will be happier.

Mr Lange wrote:Well I finally finished deleting everyone's unbelievably fucking stupid and highly irrelevant posts. What the fuck is wrong with you people?

This is a good tutorial, albeit being an extremely obvious process.
You can also just hold shift+click to change the selection mode to global, without toggling the button.

I'm also changing this topic's title because this is a method to remove any background color. Not just white. I don't understand why you would post it as "removing white backgrounds" when it converts all colors to alpha. Why. Why mislead these poor, already misguided souls.

The same can be done in Photoshop, but I believe its a more painful procedure. Then again I haven't used it since CS2, who knows what's different. I suggest everyone stop using it anyway and switch to Paint.net and Gimp. Both you and your computer's memory will be happier.

Sorry for being misleading lol.

Anyway I thought it was for more than just white, but I knew that white backgrounds are hard to get rid of so I put white as an appeal factor. I knew it could be done in Photoshop but I never could figure it out so that's when I switched to Gimp and Paint.NET.

To do that in Photoshop isn't so hard, but well, it eats too much memory, that's why I changed to GIMP.