Saturday, October 23, 2010

Background colors

If Apple was serious about photography, they should get rid of that handful of silly colors (including about *two* useful greys) one can select as full-color desktop background, and instead just give us the whole spectrum to choose from. How hard could that be? They already do it for the background for an image.

In the meantime, there are two solutions for serious photographers: make your own backgrounds in form of a one-color image, make several in the tones and shades of grey you like.

... Or one could get really smart, make a small GIF image, which only consists of transparent pixels. It seems that in order to accomplish that in Photoshop, you have to make two layers, the background one deselected (invisible), and remove everything from the upper one, then save as .gif. Seems one can't remove everything from the background layer, it just takes on the current background color set in PS.

... And then you just set this empty image centered, and set the desktop background to the exact tone you want.

Update: Craniac said:
To make a transparent image in Photoshop simply rename the Background layer by double-clicking the name and changing it to anything other than Background. It then becomes like any other layer and can be transparent. It seems that there is special connotation attached to the lowest level having the name Background.
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5 comments:

craniac said...

To make a transparent image in Photoshop simply rename the Background layer by double-clicking the name and changing it to anything other than Background. It then becomes like any other layer and can be transparent. It seems that there is special connotation attached to the lowest level having the name Background.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Cool, thank you.

Ray said...

My favorite shade of gray is made from R 217, G 226 and B 233.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Yes, that's very nice, a bit cool.

Bruce said...

I use a transparent PDF file. I've been using it for a long time. I think this is where I found out about it.

http://hints.macworld.com/comment.php?mode=view&cid=12390

For those who don't know how to use this, make the transparent image your desktop image, and then select Center. You will see a little swatch of color next to the word Center. Click on that and you have a color picker for your desktop color.