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Question time!


I'm putting together a business card design, and I need a little help. I want to include a coat of arms in the design. I've found the pic and bled out the colors to make a simple black-and-white line rendering of the image to insert. However, the card is going to have a colored background, so I need the coat of arms to be on a transparent surface rather than a white one, so that when I place it on the main background image, the contours and colors will show through the line drawing. (So there won't be a big WHITE block in the middle of the color image.) Is this making sense?

How would I do that? How would I remove the white background of the line drawing so that the lines "float" by themselves without ANY other color than the lines? Does anyone know how I would do that?

If anyone knows how to go about this and can explain it clearly, I'd sure appreciate it!


I'm using Photoshop CS2, by the way.

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Courtesy of @ebertchicago, I've been grooving on an internet meme that's been around awhile, but is still incredibly cool nonetheless:


Fake Criterion Collection covers


For those of you who don't know, The Criterion Collection is a company that restores important films and markets them on high-quality, extras-laden DVDs. (They started out with VHS, then went to laserdiscs, but well, we all know what happened to those.) Getting on Criterion pretty much guarantees that your film will achieve a level of ultra-geek hipness that sure doesn't hurt. Of course, they steer clear of pretty much all pop entertainment, preferring the classic, the out-of-the-way or the rare. Which conditions led to the meme, of course. One thing you can count on with internet geeks: we just can't leave anything alone. Especially the Photoshoppers.

So I thought I'd take a crack at it myself. Here are a couple of Fake Criterion Collection covers for films that will probably never make it into their ranks:


( The Lord of the Rings )

( Star Trek XI )


Hope you like 'em.

I've got a problem with PS that's driving me bugfuck. I have two pics that are actually parts of a larger whole, and I want to combine them, first by increasing the canvas size on one and then patching the second one in and lining the two up to make the bigger whole. But when I move the second part in and try to line them up, I have to blow the image up to some ungodly size in order to do it precisely. That's because it keeps defaulting to a snap-to-grid movement that is not accurate as far as the pictures I'm working on. If I blow the image up large enough to do the match-up without fighting that snap, I lose all the detail and have a very difficult time seeing what I'm doing.

Does anybody know how to tell PS to STOP trying to snap the image to a grid? I've tried looking everywhere and can't find an option to turn this crap off. I'm using CS2, by the way.


ETA: Problem solved, thanks to txvoodoo. *goes off to picland*