[techtrucker]

I am strictly a programmer who is doing a web site for a friend. Since we're doing it on a budget I'm trying to avoid having to hire a pro. The site is very basic but adequate. But I have one particular question: How can I take a black and white line art image and inverse the black/white and make it transparent? If you go to http://www.nationalpackers.com/ you'll see the logo. I am hoping to change what's black to white and make it transparent so it can go on the blue header. For apps all I have is Photoshop Elements 2 and Fireworks.
The logo was given to me as a scanned bmp. I'm assuming I'll have to inverse the logo, select the white areas and copy/paste them into a new image that has a transparent layer? I know enough about PS to be dangerous...
Many thanks in advance for any advice!

[derbs]

Use the 'magic wand' tool. Open the scanned image in photoshop, choose the magic wand tool, and make sure these options are selected: tolerance:10, anti-aliased:on, contiguous:off. You can find these options in the grey bar just below the menu bar.

Now click on any of the white, and it should all be selected. Now hit command-i, to invert the selection so the black is selected. Do a command-c to copy, create a new document, and paste it in. You can now make it smaller by hitting command-t, and dragging any of the corner handles with the shift key held down.

[derbs]

sorry that should be command-shift-i to invert the selection.

Also, make sure you're in RGB colour mode (Image > Mode > RGB Colour)

[techtrucker]

Thanks a lot derbs, will try it out as soon as I get home.

[registered_user]

While the Magic Wand will get the job done more or less, you will achieve a much more accurate (and anti-aliased if applicable) selection by using Photoshop's Channels Palette.

Open the Channels palette, and view each channel individually. When you have found the channel with the most contrast, Command-click it in the channels palette. (with an all black and white logo such as this, you could probably just command-click the composite channel)

Anyway, once that's done, you will have selected all of the white... or black... I always get that confused. Use the Command-Shift-I command to invert the selection if necessary. Anyway, once you have the selection, and you can invert it at as needed. Then, just use the fill command (Shift-f5) to fill the selection with the foreground color. You can do that on a new layer too and hide the background to save for web with transparency.

I am presuming that you can command-click channels in Elements... If not, then kindly disregard.

[techtrucker]

Ok, the layer trick worked, thanks! It doesn't look that great when I shrink the image down to about 200 x 200 pixels, but I'll keep plugging away.
PS Elements lacks Channels...Even though I'm not an artist I am getting more and more of this kind of work and may need to get a little more serious about graphics. I'm going to the Apple Store today, may just have to come out of there with Photoshop CS. I almost bought Fireworks to do web buttons etc. but as I understand PS comes with ImageReady which does similar things.
Many thanks for the advice!