Hi,

I am designing a catalog however the photos have a background, for example the pictures are of shoes but i can see the table the shoe is sitting on and the background behind the shoe, is there a way to cut the shoes out in Photoshop so the background is removed?

Thanks

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...or you can use use the polygonal lasso tool,pen tool or for really tricky stuff Vertus fluid mask.

1. Type (Q) from keyboard (this will take you to the quick mask mode)

2. Now pick a brush, make sure your color palette has only default (Solid Black/White) colors. Black is to choose the selected area, while White is for removing. You can choose the brush size/softness as you want. i.e. if you want sharp edges you can select the sharp edge brush.

3. Select the areas you may want them to be cut-out from the picture. (Don't worry about the RED color appearing on canvas it is to help you to differentiate the selection).

4. Now you are finished with selecting the area, type (Q) from the keyboard again. You will see a selection of what you have made. If it's inverse of what you need Type (Ctrl+Alt+I) from Keyboard or go into 'select' from window menu and find 'Inverse Selection' option

5. Copy and Paste the object from here to your required file.

6. Do the above process for each picture you want.

Hope this helps - there are many ways for cutting things out, some are more reliable than others depending on your background.

what's wrong with the good olde eraser tool?

What program are you building the actual catalog in? I haven't played with InDesign much but I'm sure it has the feature that Quark has where you can cut out the image with the pen tool in Photoshop and make it a clipping path and then it will only show that part of the image when you build it into your catalog PLUS you can have type around the silo that will shape to it if you wanted that kind of look.

Amen brother! Number one tool on the pallet.