In this tutorial I'll show you some nifty tricks for a somewhat easy and higher quality character extraction, or removal from some background. This is an especially important thing to get good at whether you make wallpapers, websites or anything.

There are a few ways to go about this, one is the "magic wand tool." This can let you extract the charcter or whatever you want fairly quickly, but it doesnt usually come out very nicely, mainly you'll have lots of jagged edges. But if what you want to extract is on a solid colored background it can turn out pretty well, you just have to play with a bit. There is also a "tolerance" option for the magic wand tool, changing it's value up or down, depending on the surrounding colors can help get the extaction a little more precise. It also helps to have it's "edge" settings on anti-aliased or feathered, depending on how defined you want the edge to be, and generally you never want to use it on hard, or it'll be VERY jagged.

The next, and probably best, form of extraction is with the polygon lasso tool. With this you can get a very nice and very precise edge. To get this tool, hold down your left mouse button on the lasso tool or press the "L" button to toggle between the two lasso's. Generally I always have it's edge setting on anti-alias, but feathered has it's uses sometimes. Also, I usually have the image I'm extracting at 400-800% zoom. You can do that quickly in Fireworks by pressing ctrl+1-8. Each number generally being that percentage in hundreds (ctrl+2 - 200%, ctrl+8 - 800%, etc)

The reason for having the zoom in so much is so you can get right on the edge of what you're extracting. Now you just have to pick points along the edge of what you want. Most of the time (again, depending on the image) you want to pick points right in the middle of the charcters outline or edge, just so you get a nice anti-aliased edge with the right colors. If you end up going around the entire character with the lasso tool, you'll find that hitting delete will delete the charcter and not the surroundings, so if you do that just hit ctrl+shift+i to invert the selection and delete the surroundings instead, or you can cut and paste the character.

The last way to extract a character is with the regular lasso tool. It is almost identical to the poly lasso tool, but it's a little harder to get used to and even harder to stay on the line you want to extract. And before I forget, to get to the edge or tolerance settings for the magic wand or lasso tools, just make sure you have to "properties" window open in Fireworks MX, or just double click the tool you're using in any Fireworks prior to MX.

Keep going for the custom shapes -->