Sunday, July 18th, 2010
Issue: 37   Editor: Nyxxie


Tutorial: Picture Background Change babyb
This week has seen the anticipated profile color switchover. All normal player profiles have changed from hex code #737373 to #4A4A4A, causing many players profile pictures to look like they have a light grey border around them. Old profile pictures look, well, old. Thankfully for anyone this affects, there is an easy fix.

This tutorial is based on the principle that every picture is getting darker by the same amount. The tutorial is for Photoshop (all versions as far as I am aware) however, it should be possible to use the same method for other packages. So let us start with this simple picture.



The easiest way to approach this is by changing not only the background, but also the slightly darker grunge effect around the picture. The only bit of the image which will be left untouched is the solid rectangle in the middle. To achieve this, we use the rectangular marquee tool, which can be activated by pressing “M” or by clicking the button on the left hand menu.



We use this to select the part of the image which we do not want to change, in this case, the rectangle shown below.



Once we have the area selected, we right click anywhere on the image and click:
“Select Inverse”
Everything which you wish to change should now be selected.
To darken this area we will adjust the brightness of the image by selecting:
“Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast”



A small window will pop up. If we change the value in the box beside “Brightness:” to “-69”, the background colour should always change to the right value.



Our new image has the exact right color and does not look like it has been tampered with.



I hope you find this method useful, and I hope that it serves you as well as it has served me. Thank you for taking the time to read my article and please feel free to post your own methods below!