Goodbye Clipping Paths, Hello Transparency
Nobody enjoys drawing clipping paths — those Bezier-curve constructions that act like a silhouettist’s scissors snipping around the edge of an image. Clipping paths are not only cumbersome to draw — they are always sharp-edged rather than anti-aliased or feathered on their edges. This makes them unsuitable for silhouetting many images, including hair, clouds, or virtually anything else softer than a piece of plastic.
There are companies that will draw clipping paths for you, but perhaps it’s better to first ask: Why use clipping paths at all? Both QuarkXPress 7 and InDesign CS2 can import TIFF or PSD images that contain transparency. That is, if you can see a checkerboard background in Photoshop, that area will also be transparent when its on your page. It is often easier to create transparency than draw a clipping path, and the transparency can be partial, so you can import an image of a soft-edged puffy cloud and have it remain soft-edged in your layout.
Here’s how to do it:
Step 1: In Photoshop, you can only have transparency when you have no “Background” layer. Option-double-click on the Background layer to convert it into a normal layer that can have transparency.
Step 2: Photoshop offers dozens of ways to make a selections, but in this case we’ll choose Color Range. Pick the color of the background and click OK.
Step 3: While the selection is active, click the Add Layer Mask button in the Layers palette — the current selection is converted into a mask that hides a portion of the image. If the wrong part of the image is visible, press Command-I to invert the mask.
Step 4: Feel free to touch up the mask by painting on it; black conceals, white reveals, and gray is partially transparent.
Step 5: Now save your file in either the TIFF or PSD file formats. If you use TIFF, make sure the Layers checkbox is turned on in the Save As dialog box, and that the Transparency checkbox is enabled in the TIFF Options dialog box.
Step 6: When you import the image into QuarkXPress 7 or InDesign, you don’t need to do anything special — though you should make sure the picture box you use has a background fill of None if you want to see objects beneath it.
Using native transparency is more than just a cool special effect — it’s a huge timesaver in a production environment. When it comes time to print, the page-layout program flattens the transparent effect so the printer doesn’t have to deal with any sort of transparency issues.
