Hi I have a bit of a noob question for you guys regarding eliminating white backgrounds. I want to remove white backgrounds leaving a transparency layer. I know about the eliminate white filter but it doesnt work in v7. It seems to me there is a way to do this manually but I can't remember what it is? Any ideas?

Not sure Soapy but if you don't find a good solution I would be happy to run it through "eliminate White" here on my machine. Just drop me an email at cinema4d(a)sean-paul.com if you like.

That Eliminate White should work in v7. I've used it many times. It's always best to start a new document with a transparent background. There are many ways to do it manually. Here is one. 

Double click where it says backgound in your layers palette to change background to layer 0 (if not already a layer). Use magic wand and click on the white background of the image. Make sure your Contiguous is checked otherwise it will select all the white in your image as well. You might also need to play with your Tolerance depending on if it is a solid white. You can use the Add to Selection and Subtract from Selection. Once background is all selected then hit delete.

I should add that this method works if you have a well defined edge on your image. When you get into images with hair, grass, etc you need a new method.

You could save as  gif.; this gives you the option to keep transparency.

Screenshot would be nice :)
Magic Wand is very useful, but Select - Color range is Magic wand on steroids. And dont forget to feather the selection with Select - Feather about 1-3% is usualy enough, depends on resolution the higher res. the higher feather radius :)
Oh forgot about transparency. Either delete the pixels or open new document but check the transparency box. Then click and drag with SHIFT holded the selection from original to new transparent document and save as .TIFF, it will save you the transparency :)

Tihomir

One thing I do, is to "duplicate layer", select THAT layer, AND make sure that the background layer  is "invisible"... the eye icon in layers, turned off, then "Magic eraser" it using "contiguous" clicked ON... fiddling with the tolerance setting may, or may not be necessary, if there's variations... usually not. Lou.