How to Remove a White Background in Photoshop

Transparent line art drawings are used as the base for a digital painting or colored drawing. They’re built exclusively from lines, without any background. However, what happens if the line art you’re creating has a white background?

In this short transparent line art tutorial, I’ll show you two methods of getting crisp, transparent line art—a popular one and a professional way to delete a white background in Photoshop.

Watch How to Remove a White Background in Photoshop

Would you prefer to watch a tutorial on how to delete a white background in Photoshop? You can learn how to remove a white background in Photoshop by watching this video. If you enjoy it, visit our Envato Tuts+ YouTube channel for more!

1. How to Use a Quick Method to Make White Transparent in Photoshop

If you don’t have any line art to use at the moment, download the attachment and follow me. Or you can draw your own line art using a pencil brush Photoshop kit from Envato Elements. Let’s begin this tutorial on how to delete a white background in Photoshop and create transparent line art. Place your scan/line art in a new file. Set its Blend Mode to Multiply.

This mode helps make white transparent in Photoshop. The white part of the layer becomes transparent, leaving black intact. So this is what we wanted, right?

Still, this way of using Photoshop to make white transparent is not without its flaws. The problem may occur if you wanted to use the transparent line art directly. For example, if you changed the Blend Mode to Overlay, the dark lines would get a darker version of the color below. It works great in cel shading!

However, here we can’t change the Blend Mode, because only Multiply makes white transparent. If we used Overlay, the lines would get a darker color, but the white around would “absorb” all the rest of the colors.

This method doesn’t really give you a transparent line art background. It only pretends there’s no line art background, but you’re not really allowed to use the lines or the illusion disappears. As you can see, it’s not the best method to use Photoshop to make white transparent.

2. A More Professional Method to Use Photoshop to Remove a White Background

There’s another way to make white transparent in Photoshop. It’s more complicated than simply selecting an item on the list, but also far more effective. This transparent line art background method will give us our dark lines—instead of pretending that there is no background, we will remove it for real.

Don’t get scared by the number of steps. I just made this tutorial to remove the background in Adobe Photoshop as detailed as possible for you!

Step 1

Let’s begin using Photoshop to remove a white background. To make sure there is only black and white in the picture, go to Image > Mode > Grayscale. Select Don’t Merge and then Discard.

Step 2

Select the whole picture with Control-A. Copy it.

Step 3

Go to the Channels panel. You can find it next to Layers, and if it’s not there, simply open it with Window > Channels.

Step 4

Click Create New Channel to continue creating a transparent drawing.

A new “layer” should appear on the list. This is an alpha channel—it knows only two colors: black (transparent) and white (opaque). For now it’s black, so there’s nothing there.

Step 5

Paste the selection to this layer. Deselect (Control-D).

Step 6

Click Load Channel as Selection.

Step 7

Let’s continue this tutorial on how to remove the background in Adobe Photoshop. A selection should appear on the picture. As I said before, for an alpha channel, white is opaque and black is transparent. When we loaded the selection, only the opaque parts were selected—the white parts.

If you Invert the selection now (Control-Shift-I), you’ll get the opposite selected—only black parts. Only the line art.

Step 8

Select the Gray channel again.

Step 9

Now, create a New Layer to make white transparent in Photoshop.

Step 10

Fill the selection with black using the Paint Bucket Tool (G).

Step 11

If you deselect (Control-D) now, you’ll see that the line art became twice as dark. It’s because we’ve got two sets of lines in this transparent line art!

Remove the scan to fix the problem and carry on using Photoshop to remove a white background.

Step 12

This next part is crucial to delete a white background in Photoshop. If you hide the layer, you’ll see only the transparent line art background. Just what we wanted, without any pretending!

Let’s give this transparent drawing some versatility. You can now safely use any Blend Mode on this layer—Multiply doesn’t block you anymore. Just don’t forget to switch back to Image > Mode > RGB Color.

You can also use this transparent line art background with all the Blending Options on the lines, for example Gradient Overlay:

What about more traditional-looking sketches, with a lot of grays instead of black? That’s no problem! Just make sure you’ve cleaned up the scan first, and then you can use the same trick.

Now You Know How to Remove the Background in Adobe Photoshop to Make Transparent Line Art!

You learned how to remove a white background in Photoshop to create a transparent drawing! As you can see, a piece of line art drawn by accident on a white layer isn’t lost, and sketches drawn traditionally aren’t bound to their background for eternity. You just need to remove the background in Adobe Photoshop.

Want to learn more about line art? Check out this article on the line art design trend to see how designers are using line art in their projects.

Discover Photoshop Brushes and Resources From Envato Elements

Looking for more great resources? Then head on over to Envato Elements. You’ll find hundreds of Photoshop brushes, add-ons, and other creative assets for your drawing needs. Check out one of our favorite pencil brush Photoshop kits below!

Pencil Brush Photoshop Set (ABR)

If you love to do digital drawings in Photoshop, you need a pencil brush Photoshop kit like this one. This set includes 25 brushes for all your needs. You’ll get the whole pack of lead pencils: hard and soft, made as sketching and stippling-ready ones. Use this pencil brush Photoshop kit for your transparent line art projects!

Explore More Drawing Tutorials and Resources

I hope you liked this tutorial on how to remove the background in Adobe Photoshop and create transparent line art. You’ve seen how to turn an image into a line drawing in Photoshop. You also know where to find the best Photoshop brushes and add-ons.

However, if you need more than a tutorial for Photoshop to make white transparent, check out these other drawing resources:

Post date July 7, 2015

This content originally appeared on Envato Tuts+ Tutorials and was authored by Monika Zagrobelna

Transparent line art drawings are used as the base for a digital painting or colored drawing. They're built exclusively from lines, without any background. However, what happens if the line art you're creating has a white background?

In this short transparent line art tutorial, I'll show you two methods of getting crisp, transparent line art—a popular one and a professional way to delete a white background in Photoshop.

Watch How to Remove a White Background in Photoshop

1. How to Use a Quick Method to Make White Transparent in Photoshop

If you don't have any line art to use at the moment, download the attachment and follow me. Or you can draw your own line art using a pencil brush Photoshop kit from Envato Elements. Let's begin this tutorial on how to delete a white background in Photoshop and create transparent line art. Place your scan/line art in a new file. Set its Blend Mode to Multiply.

This mode helps make white transparent in Photoshop. The white part of the layer becomes transparent, leaving black intact. So this is what we wanted, right?

photoshop line art multiply how it works

However, here we can't change the Blend Mode, because only Multiply makes white transparent. If we used Overlay, the lines would get a darker color, but the white around would "absorb" all the rest of the colors.

This method doesn't really give you a transparent line art background. It only pretends there's no line art background, but you're not really allowed to use the lines or the illusion disappears. As you can see, it's not the best method to use Photoshop to make white transparent.

2. A More Professional Method to Use Photoshop to Remove a White Background

There's another way to make white transparent in Photoshop. It's more complicated than simply selecting an item on the list, but also far more effective. This transparent line art background method will give us our dark lines—instead of pretending that there is no background, we will remove it for real.

Don't get scared by the number of steps. I just made this tutorial to remove the background in Adobe Photoshop as detailed as possible for you!