Remove white space from picture???

[Remnant]

Just a question on shape creation. If have an angle picture of a rack mount
server that i want to make a Visio shape. I know how to create shapes and
import pictures, so no problems there.

The issue I have is removing the whitespace around the picture so that it is
'clean', and doesn't come out as a white rectangle with a picture inside it.

I put the picture in Photoshop and used the magic wand to ensure just the
picture itself was highlighted, then pasted that into a new empty photoshop
file with no background, then tried saving as both jpg and gif. in both cases
when i import the picture into a visio shape i still get the white space.

Can somebody explain to me how I can get around this and have a nice neat
picture when it isn't square (or rectangle?). I tried crop within visio, but
it seems limited to simply straight edge cropping...

Oh, and I'm on Visio 2007 if that makes any differences to instructions!

Cheers.

 

[Mark Nelson [MS]]

I'm not sure that Visio can do this since it involves being able to set the
transparent "color" on the shape.

--
Mark Nelson
Office Graphics - Visio
Microsoft Corporation

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[Remnant]

that makes sense. anybody know how i can do it then? i have access to
photoshop through work, so surely i have the right tool. i even thought i was
doing it the right way. obviously not though.

there is obviously a way - i can get stuff like that from vendors for their
servers so i imagine is easy once i know how... if anybody has the secret i'd
love to hear from you!

 

[John Goldsmith]

Hello Remnant,

Couple of suggestions for you:

a) Save your images as png files (which support transpancy) and use them in
Visio

and / or

b) Take a look at this post by Chris Roth:

http://www.visguy.com/2007/07/29/masking-images-in-visio/

Best regards

John


John Goldsmith
www.visualSignals.co.uk

 

[Remnant]

Bravo! Got BOTH working. Obviously .png was a lot quicker (strange i always
thought gif supported transparent space which was why i got confused - aren't
desktop icons usually gifs???) anyway, i digress.

the vector link was a great tutorial to learn something new, even though
..png will be the most used way for me.

thankyou - you have no idea how much this will change the quality of what i
can produce!