In my experience some designers will talk about “right way” to do something in Photoshop. Personally, I love to learn every way to do something because different situations call for different methods. Everyone works a little bit differently and it’s important to find the methods you’re most comfortable and efficient with. With that said this tutorial isn’t about showing you the “right” way to remove a white background… it’s about the fast way.

This tutorial will show you a quick and dirty way to isolate an image on a white background. This method is fast and looks fine for web graphics, but I wouldn’t recommend it for anything hi-res.

Let’s get started shall we?

So you start off with your image on a white background, in this case it’s a blue piece of luggage on a white background that I want to drop onto a yellow background.

So I drag the image of the luggage onto my new orange background. At this point I can choose to use a selection mask to carefully select around the perimeter of the luggage, or I can use the lasso tool to do the same. Some might even suggest using the eraser tool instead. Those are all great methods that I use often in large files, but in this case I’m going to cheat a little.

Rather than following any of the “correct” methods I mentioned, I’m simply going to set the layer’s blending properties to “Multiply” which makes anything white transparent. Obviously that looks like crap, but there’s more!

Now I make a new layer underneath the luggage layer. In this layer I will use a brush to color in behind the luggage with white. The white layer on top of the color layer blocks your background color from showing through your image.

To make straight lines I click, hold down shift and click again and a line will be drawn between the two points. I fill in the edges using this method then scribble in the rest. The benefit to this method is if you make a mistake you can easily erase the bottom layer without altering your original image. It’s also less precise than using selection masks and can be done in less than a minute with a tablet or even a mouse and you don’t have to look at any weird red overlays. With practice this can be done in a few seconds.

Another great befit to this method is any shadows you end up with look natural against any background since they don’t contain any of that left over white color. As you can see in the example above the shadow on the left using the Multiply method looks much more natural and less choppy.

This method doesn’t have the kind of accuracy that’s necessary for print, but it works just find in a small scale web graphic when you’re pressed for time.

If you have a method that works great for you, please share it in the comments.