I am using photosho 5(Yes I know its outdated). I am making minis for a game I play online. I import the picture, remove the background with the magic wand, export as gif. I get white artifacts surrounding the mini after it is saved. I have tried matting/defringe and remove white matte. nothing has worked.

You can see them on the pic below.

can anyone help?

ah.you used the magic wand... did you smoothen out the edges after it was selected? click on refine edges to do that. also..you might want to try increasing the tolerance level. 

work at 200-300% of the size to see exactly whta was selected and smooth the edges become. 

for something like this.. i'd use the marquee tool and work my way around it.. or a mask.. 

cheers and hope that helps. 

• rosie 

The white pixels we see around your image are pixels that aren't either completely opaque or completely transparent, that's caused by the anti-aliasing when your remove the background.  When saving as a gif, the pixels have to be either completely opaque or completely transparent, so those pixels that aren't 100% transparent are kind of merged with white when you export as a gif.  I'm not sure if this is in photoshop 5, but see if there's an option with the magic wand to remove the Anti-Alias, in my version of photoshop, it's a little box that I check or uncheck, I guess if it's available in ps5 it's probably something similar.  By using the wand with the anti-alias uncheck, the pixels of your image will be either completely transparent or completely opaque, no in between.  I hope I'm explaining this well enough and it's not too confusing.

Lucie
finfond.net
finfond.net (store)

OK thanks for your help.

I dont know what working with a mask is all about or how to do it.

I made some more today using the magic wand with anti alias off. Still geting the white edges around it. 

Is there a way to save the image with a transparent background instead of EXPORTING it as a gif? A JPG is prefered as I have a ton of them to make.

jpg doesn't save transparency, the best would be png, but I'm not sure photoshop 5 works really well with transparent png's if at all.  I think it's a format that Adobe finally looked at in ps6 maybe even only in ps7.  You can try, because I'm really not sure at all, I can't remember very well how things were in ps5, it's been a while.

Here's your last one saved as a png just to show you how it would come out, I've removed quickly and roughly the white pixels around it and resaved is as a png.

Lucie
finfond.net
finfond.net (store)

This looks awesome.  Would like to know how you removed the artifacts?

 

see if APS5 has "matte colour" pref, tool, selector et al.  then select matte colour to most closely match gif edge colour.

I just answered your site mail. 

Lucie
finfond.net
finfond.net (store)

 

if able to choose matte colour in APS5, edge will look smooth, at least in OS X.  I dunno how it looks in win7, hence I used restrictive clours.

Thanks everyone for the directions. I think I found a solution. When i go to EXPORT it asks for transparency color. I have been leaving it default gray. I switched to black and this is the end results. I am happy with it.

great! well done!  :-)