Removing a Plain Background the Old-Fashioned Way

Let me begin by showing you the old-fashioned way of removing a background from an image. Comparing this method with how you can do it in Fireworks will clearly demonstrate the advantages of doing it the Fireworks way.

The image you'll work with in this tutorial is the easiest type of image you'll have to deal with when performing this kind of task, because it has a plain and even background of a single color (see Figure 1). Traditionally, you would use the Magic Wand tool to select the background around the image and delete it. You would then select the background inside the ring and delete it as well.

Figure 1. Diamond ring on a white background

There are two problems with this commonly used approach. The first one is that it is destructive and irreversible. You cannot modify the remaining object's contour after removing the background. Moreover, if you are not satisfied with the result, you must start from scratch. That wouldn't be much of a hassle with this diamond ring image because you are only redoing four simple operations. However, if your image background was more complex it, could become a tedious task to redo all the selections on a fresh copy of the image in order to delete its background.

The second problem is that, no matter how carefully you make your selection, pixels with the color of the old background will probably stay behind on the contour of the image and will appear when you place the image over a new background—which is usually the goal of the entire exercise to begin with.

You could increase the Magic Wand tool's Tolerance setting to eliminate more, or all, of the old background's pixels but the edge of the image would become jagged. Figure 2 shows an example of removing the background on the diamond ring image and then placing that image on a black background.

Figure 2. Magic Wand tolerance set to 2 (top) and 4 (bottom)

In the top image of Figure 2, the Magic Wand tolerance is set to 2. Notice the unsightly white pixels that are left behind. Not good. In the bottom image, the tool's tolerance is set to 4 and the white pixels are pretty much gone. Yet notice how jagged the contour's edge is. In both cases the Magic Wand tool's Edge setting is set to Anti-Alias so that the jagged edge is not due to a selection with a hard edge. Using feathering would only marginally improve the result. It would alleviate the jagginess problem but you would lose the edge's sharpness that you had when the ring appeared over its original white background. The result would look fuzzy and unnatural.

In Fireworks, a workaround that is sometimes recommended to try and minimize the jagginess of an image's edge after removing its background the way I describe above is to apply a glow effect to the resulting image with a width of 2, opacity of 100% , softness of 1, and with the color of the new background. To my eye this still does not look good enough when the new background color is different from the original, and when you switch to yet another background color you have to modify the glow's color as well—which is tedious and annoying.

There is a better way. You can avoid any jagged edges, preserve the sharpness of the contour, and anti-alias it to any background color you choose without requiring any additional work on your part. Welcome to the Fireworks way.

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