How to Remove the Background from a Picture

Looking to cut out the background from an image, but aren’t quite sure how to do it? Well, no matter if you have Photoshop or not, you’ve come to the right place. In this article we’ll cover two different methods that will get the job done: one that uses Photoshop, and one that relies on a browser-based Web app.

We’ll start with the simplest option – the Web app. Even if you’re partial to full-featured programs like Photoshop or GIMP, we highly recommend checking out Clipping Magic. We like it because the learning curve is insanely low, it doesn’t require any downloads or installs because it runs in your browser, and it doesn’t cost a single cent. The program is currently in alpha, but it still works like a charm. Here’s a quick rundown of how to use it: 

If you’re fortunate enough to have a copy of Photoshop and prefer to use that,  we’ve also included a quick tutorial for that on page two. 

1. How to remove backgrounds with Clipping Magic

So let’s say you want to Photoshop a mustache onto your boss’s face, but you don’t have Photoshop and all of the gloriously curly mustaches you find have annoying white backgrounds on them. In order to strip out the background and get a PNG image of the mustache by itself, follow these steps:

1. Download/save the image to your computer.

2. Head over to ClippingMagic.com.

3. Click the big blue Choose File button or just drag and drop your image into the dotted box.

4. Draw a green line on the parts of the image you want to keep.

5. Draw a red line on the parts of the image you want to remove, i.e., the background. Zoom in as needed for more precision.

6. If the image preview on the right looks correct, go ahead and click save. 

Removing complex backgrounds

Looking to remove the background from an actual photograph, not just some clip art with a white background? Don’t worry – Clipping Magic can handle this too, but it’ll take a little extra work. To get the job done, just follow the same steps as above, but get a little bit more precise with the red and green markings. For example, this picture of my coworker Brandon Widder is pretty good, but the background just doesn’t do him justice. I want to replace it with something a bit more badass.

When I first dropped the image into Clipping Magic, the software’s edge-finding algorithm did a decent job of finding Brandon, but needed a little extra help catching his majestic, flowing locks.

So, to make it more accurate, I needed to zoom in and get more precise with my green markings. You can change the size of your brush in the top menu, but I’ve found that’s it’s much easier to just zoom in really far. Once you’re close enough to see where the algorithm missed the edges, drop a few green marks to help it straighten out. 

Once you’re done with that, just zoom back out too see if the finished product looks all right. Mine’s not perfect, but it’ll do.

Now I can add a newer, more appropriate background…

Perfect!

If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments section below and we’ll see if we can help!

2. How to remove a background with Photoshop

Photoshop is a pretty amazing program, and with such a massive selection of tools, the program offers a number of different ways to strip backgrounds from images. We’ll start with the easiest method. If you’re dealing with a background that’s a solid color, you can strip it away with these simple steps:

1. Open the image in Photoshop.

2. Select the Magic Wand tool.

3. Click on the background and hit Delete. It’ll magically disappear.

4. Save your image, and make sure it’s in PNG format.

Removing complex backgrounds

To strip away a more complex background in Photoshop, you’ll need to dig a bit deeper into your toolbox. Photoshop is an incredibly full-featured program, and as such, it supplies you with a myriad different ways to remove backgrounds. Some of these methods carry far steeper learning curves than others, so for this tutorial we’ll go over a method that’s fairly straightforward. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Open your photo in Photoshop.

2. Select the Background Eraser tool.

3. Adjust the brush size to your liking.

4. Set the Sampling to Continuous.

5. Set the Limits to Find Edges.

6. Adjust the Tolerance. Lower is generally better since a high setting will remove more colors. It’s generally a safe bet to opt for a setting in the 20-30 range.

7. Hover your brush over an area of the background that’s near your object. Click and it will magically be removed.

8. Continue this process until you’ve created a background-free border around your entire object. Feel free to adjust the tolerance as needed where your image gets lighter/darker around the edges.

9. Once you’ve got a solid border around your object, you can switch over to the regular Eraser tool to remove the rest and put on the finishing touches before you save

That’s it! if you have got any questions, feel free to post them in the comments section below and we’ll see if we can help!

20 Places to Educate Yourself Online for Free

It seems like these days you can learn just about anything online for free, but of course some of that information is better than others. The good news is there are plenty of reputable places to educate yourself online for free, and here’s a TechProceed.com's compiled list of 20 of them to get you started.

1. Coursera

The coolest thing about Internet learning is that you can take college courses which in the past were only available to people who forked over immense sums of money to attend elite colleges. Coursera brings a bunch of those classes together into one site, offering nearly 400 courses ranging from Introduction to Guitar from Berklee College of Music to Constitutional Law from Yale.

Courses typically include videos and certain coursework (such as online quizzes) that must be completed in a certain amount of time, as these courses are monitored by a professor. Stop by regularly to see what’s new, or search for topics that interest you can put them on a watch list so you’ll be notified when a new class begins.

2. Khan Academy

Home to more than 3,000 videos on subjects ranging from SAT prep to cosmology, art history to calculus, Khan Academy is a great place to learn. Detailed courses are broken into smaller sections of text or videos for ease of learning that fits into your schedule, and all are self-paced so you can spend as much or as little time with the subject as you like.

You can also leave comments or ask questions if you want more information or if something isn’t clear in the lessons.

3. OpenCourseWare

The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a worldwide effort to make college and university level course materials accessible for free on the Internet. Search for a specific topic that interests you, or search by language (20 are available) or the source of the coursework.

There are more than 5,000 classes in English alone, covering everything from statistical thermodynamics (Middle East Technical University) to Epidemics in South African History (University of Cape Town) and Creole Language and Culture (University of Notre Dame).

4. ALISON

A global-learning resource with courses in English, French and German, ALISONcovers everything from SAT prep to health and safety courses required in Ireland. There are lessons on everything from study skills to American copyright law, currency exchange to nonprofit fundraising, and general accounting to negotiating when buying a house.

Completion of a course grants you “certification,” which is a British designation, but it’s still kind of fun.

5. MIT Open Courseware

If you always wanted to attend a big-name school like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, now you can do the next best thing by taking many of its courses for free from your home on your own time. The MIT Open Courseware site posts course materials from a wide variety of classes you can search by department.

Choosing a course will show you when it was originally taught and by whom, and will give you access to the syllabus, course calendar, readings, assignments and study materials. You can download the course materials and work through the course at your own pace.

6. Academic Earth

If you’d like a broader collection of courses than MIT provides, Academic Earthis a great place to look. This free course aggregator has a stunning collection of courses from around 50 universities across the globe. You can search by source or general subject.

Don’t miss the curated playlists on topics such as natural laws, the nature of evil and the economic crisis. The video electives—with subjects like how to take a punch and why World War II made us fat—are lots of fun, too.

7. Open Learning Institute

The Open Learning Institute from Carnegie Mellon University allows access to a handful of course materials so you can learn at your own pace from the same kind of materials and self-guided assessments that would be used in a classroom. Their offerings are limited, but there’s a lot of detail in the coursework. Instructor-led courses are also sometimes available.

8. Open Culture

This site isn’t very pretty, but Open Culture does boast a collection of more than 700 downloadable courses, including college-level, certificate-bearing classes, language lessons, educational materials for K-12 and more.

There are also just some interesting links that aren’t to courses but you’ll still learn something from, such as this post on a reading list suggested by Ernest Hemingway.

9. Open Education Database

The well-designed Open Education Database claims more than 10,000 courses from universities from around the world. Search by topic and you’ll see the number of full courses, as well as which courses have audio lessons, video lessons or mixed media, so you can learn in whatever way you like.

You can also use this site to learn about online and offline schools, should you choose to continue your education in a more formal way.

10. iTunes U

Many of these same online courses can be accessed away from your computer with the help of iTunes U, a free app that can be downloaded to you iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. It says that it includes 500,000 different courses, with material ranging from elementary school to college-level.

There’s also educational material here from respected institutions like the New York Public Library and MoMA. You can also add notes to the videos, share with friends and keep your course materials in iBooks so you have everything you need to learn wherever you are.

11. TED

The TED talks are a legendary source of information on all sorts of topics, and any discussion of how to educate yourself for free online needs to include them. There are now thousands of videos on all sorts of topics available on the site.

If you’re a fan of whimsy you can also get the site to suggest a fascinating, beautiful or informative video for you, among other tags. This may not be formal education but it certainly can be life-changing.

12. 99U

Love videos by experts on all sorts of topics? After you visit TED, check out99U, which is another great source of educational videos on all sorts of topics. It has a strong focus on the subject of creativity, business development and innovation, so it’s sure to be of interest if you’re an entrepreneur or in a creative line of work.

13. Ignite

If you want to learn something new and you’re really pressed for time, check out Ignite videos. The purpose of this series of speaking events is to have each person share something innovative or inspiring in just five minutes. Sounds silly, but you can get a big dose of greatness in a short amount of time.

14. Wikiversity

If you prefer your learning to be text-based, check out Wikiversity. As you might imagine, this site is part of the Wikimedia Foundation and includes detailed pages on a variety of subjects. It includes information of value to learners from preschool to college and beyond, and like other wiki projects is open-source and collaborative.

This is a good site or browsing, and the “random” button is a lot of fun

How to Find Out Which Windows Process is Using a File

Ever try to delete, move, or rename a file only to get a Windows system warning with something like one of these messages?

• "Cannot delete file: Access is denied"
• "There has been a sharing violation"
• "The source or destination file may be in use"
• "The file is in use by another program or user".
• "Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use"

One of the best ways to handle locked files or folders is to use the free Microsoft program Process Explorer. Here is how to use it to find out what program, DLL, or handle is using a file or folder. You will need to run as administrator.

How to find out what program is using a file

In Windows 7 or 8, the system message may tell you what program is using the file. If it doesn’t or if you are using Windows XP, there is a simple way to find the program:

1. Open Process Explorer, running as administrator.
2. On the toolbar, find the gunsight icon on the right (shown highlighted in the figure shown below).
3. Drag the icon and drop it on the open file or folder that is locked.
4. The executable that is using the file will be highlighted in the Process Explorer main display list.

How to find out which handle or DLL is using a file

1. Open Process Explorer, running as administrator.
2. Enter the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+F. Altenatively, click the “Find” menu and select “Find a Handle or DLL”.
3. A search dialog box will open.
4. Type in the name of the locked file or other file of interest. Partial names are usually sufficient.
5. Click the button “Search”,
6. A list will be generated. There may be a number of entries.
7. An individual handle in the list can be killed by selecting it and pressing the delete key. However, care is necessary when deleting handles, as instabilities may occur. Often, just rebooting will free a locked file.

How to Stop Google from Keeping a Record of Every Search You Make

Do you use Gmail, the Chrome browser, or other Google service? Then Google may be keeping a record of every search query you make. That’s right; if you have a Google account, Google may know everything you ever looked for on the web. That is, unless you turn off Google’s collecting of all your searches and clean out the web history they’ve kept. Here’s how.

Turn off Google Web History

1. Go to the web page https://history.google.com
2. Sign in to your Google account if you aren’t already signed in.
3. Click the gear icon in the upper right corner (example shown in figure on the right).
4. Choose “Settings”’
5. The page that opens contains the section shown in the figure below.
6. Click the button “Turn off” to stop Google collecting the data. If you change your mind, you can always turn Web History back on.

Delete items in Google Web History

1. Previously collected data will still be there. To remove it, click the link contained in the word “delete” in the sentence, “You can also delete all past Google search activity or remove particular items from your recent activity.” The link is hard to see and I have highlighted it in yellow in the figure. 
2. You will get a dialog box asking if you want to delete all items
3. Click the button “Delete All”
4. You can also delete only selected items by using the link contained in the phrase “recent activity” as indicated in the figure

What does Google do with this data? Why, they sell the information to advertisers, of course. Or maybe, they also give it to the government. Who knows?