Removing Image Background - Pixlr Magic Wand

hi there today I want to show you how to use the magic wand tool and Pixlr to remove a background to make it transparent hi there I'm Jamie Keith welcome to teachers tech where I explore technology weekly and as I said I'm an exploring Pixlr this week the magic one tool it's a great way to take away that background if you're looking for some other Pixlr tutorials just check out the card up in the top right hand corner and I'll connect a playlist there or check in the description down below so with transparent backgrounds I'm just going to give an example with I'm gonna Google slides and let's say this robot here has the white background and this tower has the sky background and I want to remove them so I'm just gonna go over to my

Pixlr editor here and I'm gonna add this is a free app if you haven't used this before so I'm just gonna go ahead and scroll down and I'm gonna launch the web the Pixlr editor right here this one and I'm gonna go ahead and open those images from my for my desktop so I'm going to open image from computer and I have few different copies of that I've been working on with these so I have robot one so with robot one what I want to do is remove the background and now the simplest way to do this and some people will say to copy paste over to a transparent background which you could do that would be to just double click on this lock over here because as soon as I do that makes it so I can remove when I remove the background it'll be transparent right away so the magic wand

tool is right here in what it does it selects colors of similar so if it's all the same color in this case it's gonna work very easily so when I click on a certain white portion and just hit delete it goes away and you can see that the checkered pattern behind it represents the transparent background so it won't show up if I save it correctly and put it on to something like Google slides so I'm just gonna go around here and delete the places the reason it doesn't go all the way around because

the robot touches the edges and it stops the magic wand from moving outside of those areas and I'm just delete and in between the legs here and there's actually a couple places on the feet if I noticed that I have to hit delete also on the other thing I can hold shift down and I could keep clicking we'll select more areas at the same time I think I have a couple spots on the other foot here that I need to get rid of I could zoom up on different parts if you need to get closer and more details sometimes just zooming up will work too so I'm just gonna go ahead and resave this again file save and this is where

you got to make sure that you have it you can't save as a JPEG you need to move it to transparent full quality the PNG and I'm just gonna call this one a now and I'm gonna go ahead and hit OK and I'm gonna save it to my desktop and it will save so I'm gonna go back over to the Google slides to show you what the difference is now I'm gonna insert the image I'm gonna upload it from my computer and this was called one a open and as it goes in you'll see now it has no background anymore so that way I don't have to have that white square around it and it looks a lot better that way so now with this tower image is a little differently it has a background with the sky that's not completely the same color so I'm gonna go over here and I'm just going to close the robot down since I'm done with that one right now and I'm gonna open up from my computer the tower here that I have and as I said so before my last one it was a solid white so really easy to work with the magic wand tool I'm gonna select a color so if isolate just click here notice it doesn't select everywhere it kind of shows where it's it just doesn't stretch because the pixels change a little bit now I can do a few different things with it I can change the tolerance of my magic wand you can notice if I click on different things so I changed the tolerance now increase the tolerance and it just selected more area at the same time so that made it very easy you have a few different options to make it smoother and how it on how it connects and how it selects everything here too so a different way I'm just gonna go back down if you if it was a little bit more calm you just can't change the tolerance like that so another option that you would have I'm just gonna quickly deselect this here deselect all now you could also being if you're using the magic wand tool here I'm just gonna go back here magic one you can also hold the shift key and keep clicking in a certain area but in that way will work too so you can hold down the shift and it will grow as you go through but for a picture like this the tolerance it works well to to go ahead and use it that way I'm just gonna deselect again and then I'll have it all when I raise my tolerance because there is the contrast there too so now i justed it too much the contrast and look what happened it's actually grabbing part of this so again going back to this one and I'm gonna bring this down to about here I'm gonna deselect it one more time and now when I click on it you can see I have a nice it's nice and clean the other thing I haven't done yet is double clicked over here and now I can just simply hit my delete and I have a transparent background file save oops I'll save make sure you change it PNG I'm gonna call this tower one a save on my desktop again and insert it in insert image and look for my one a right here so it's gonna upload it and you're gonna see now it has no background around it so that's how you get rid of a

background use the magic wand tool remember it's more for a cleaner contrast if it's a more complicated you want to use the lasso tool which I'll connect another video on how to do that and I'll also put a video how to superimpose these over top so if you're using green screen or something that you can take an image and put it with a different background so just check the cards above if you want to access those videos and remember I do these weekly tech tips and you like what you see please subscribe to my channel thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time