Photoshop Elements transparent background

Why would anyone want to do this?

Logos on websites and scrapbooks are two big reasons.

Another is images that don’t have perfectly square corners. You might want rounded corners, a circle or oval, you might even want an octagon. Although I’d be surprised about that last one.

The number one rule for having images with transparent backgrounds in Elements is to save those files as PNGs. If you save them as JPEGs, the background will save as white.

Since the background of my blog is white, it’s not good for showing you this type of example. So I’m going to put the examples on a pretend gray blog page.

And here is is saved as a JPEG.

That is the same exact file, except for the PNG/JPG extension at the end. The one with the white background is going to look like a square unless your blog or website is the same color white. The PNG graphic, however, will look like a circle where ever you put it.

That brings us to an interesting concept about Elements. You can only have rectangular files. But if your design pixels are in the shape of a circle and you save as a PNG to keep your background transparent, your graphic will mirror the shape of your pixels. You can see from this image that transparency, in PSE, is indicated by the gray and white checkerboard.

(You can actually customize the appearance of that checkerboard in PSE, if you don’t like it. Go to the Edit Menu, select Preferences and then Transparency. d.)

I know you understand this by now and I don’t need to repeat myself, but I’ll say it again anyway. If I were to save the image above as a JPEG, it would look like a white square with a circular logo in the center. If I save it as a PNG, it will look like a circular logo with no background.

Let’s look at with scrapbooking in mind.

I have this picture of my daughter jumping and I want to extract her and put her in a digital scrapbook layout with graphic embellishments around her.

After extracting her, I save the file as a PNG so that I can show her jumping out of any graphic I want.