A loooong time ago, when I was very into designing digital art, I had a method of cutting out images from their background.

Sometimes, video game art would have characters drawn on plain white backgrounds, and it was easy to remove all the white. I would then, somehow, select the remaining character (a flashing dotted line would trace itself around the character), then I would feather it, and then crop the imagine. This would remove any stray white marks around the edges.

However, over the years and months, I have forgotten how I did the selection thing. I could have sworn that I just selected a box around the character, then did "select inverse", but that doesn't work.

So, if anyone knows how to select just the character, (it's a pretty easy thing to do, you don't have to trace it or anything), I would greatly, greatly appreciate the knowledge. It's been driving me crazy for days now, because I have some images I'm wanting to cut out.

If I've been too confusing in explaining what I'm asking for, I'll try to elaborate if I need to.

That's similar to what I want, but not quite. The selects every line on the image. What I'm wanting to do, is select just the outlines of the image.

When I do what that method describes, and click delete, it deletes large portions of the image. I'm trying to remove like one pixel from around the edges.

I feel like I'm being very unclear, but it's frustrating trying to describe it.

Maybe use the wand tool? Wand selects colours I think, so if you click in a blank space, it'd select all the space. Click on a black line, it'd select the black.

Okay, the wand is not how I used to do it, but It does the exact same thing.

Thank you -very- much. It was killing me not being able to remember how to do that.

Anytime I'm completely hopeless at this sort of stuff, but what little I know, I'm glad to share!

There are a few ways of doing what you want to do.

One is the magic wand tool, another is using the Color channels of an image, and creating a selection from those (much more accurate)

Another possible method is to use the various filters to find edges, or possible adjustment layers to create a highcontrast image that then allows you to use the magic wand, or color channel selection.