Getting Rid of that White Box

Problem: When I bring in my scanned file I get a white box around the image. This is a problem when I place the image on a coloured box. How do I get rid of the box?

First of all we need to scan our item. Now there is two ways that we can do this. The first way will be do the operation in Corel.

Open up Corel and import the scanned item into Corel. For this lesson we use a logo I received from a customer that was having the same problem. See figure 1.

Figure 1

Draw a yellow box as I have done in Figure 1.

Drag the logo onto the yellow box. See Figure 2.

Figure 2

Next we will go to the “Bitmap Menu” and select the “Bitmap colour mask”. See Figure 3.

Figure 3

If you look over to the right of the screen where your “Docker” window is, you will notice that you now have a new command window. See Figure 4

Figure 4

Next we need to select the logo. See Figure 5

Figure 5

Next we will need to go to back to the bitmap mask command window. Here we will select the first box by clicking in the square to the right. See the red box in figure 6.

Figure 6

Make sure that the “Hide Colours” is selected. See the green box in figure 6.

Make sure the “Tolerance” setting is set to “0”. See the maroon box in figure 6.

Next click on the eyedropper tool. See the blue box in figure 6.

Now we will go over and click on the “white” area that surrounds the logo. See Figure 7. Notice that your cursor has changed into the “eyedropper” – green box.

Figure 7

After you click in the white area (a check mark will appear) if you look back at the “colour bitmap mask” command window you will see that the area in the box that we selected is now white. See Figure 8 – red box.

Figure 8

Click “Apply” in the “Bitmap Colour Mask” command window.

The white box should have disappeared. See Figure 9.

Figure 9

Now we make look like we are done but there is a check we need to do. Zoom in on the top left side of the “Y” in “York” and lets see what we have. See Figure 10. You will see what I refer to as “chaf” (a word taken from my days on the farm) or different coloured boxes (See insert in Figure 10). This is interesting. The text looks blue on the screen. Why do I have these little boxes of different colours (white and light blue)? Can be two things. A scan that was not done right (settings were not right or the original artwork was not good) or Corel is not selecting enough of the image to get us to the dark blue edges. Now if I were sublimating this image you would get a faint gray line around the logo. This is not good so we need to clean this up.

Figure 10

Now if we go over to the “Bitmap colour mask ”command window” we will now work with the “tolerance” tool. The tolerance tool  allows us to select more colours that we can on this case hide. In our original example we select just white. As the tolerance tool was at “0” we only masked (hidden) only the white. If we want to include more colours we will increase the tolerance which will hide more colours. So in the tolerance setting change it from 0 to 22. Click “Apply”

Now look at Figure 11. You will see that we have “lost” some more colours. There are no more white blocks. What we have done is started to take away blocks that are not pure white. If we increase the number you will eventually remove the light blue colour blocks. Try it. However be careful because you could start removing colours from other parts of the logo. Take it up to 70.

Figure 11

If you want to include another colour just click in the white box below the first box and with the eyedropper tool go out and select another colour (a check mark will appear in the box). Then click on “Apply”. If you want to delete a selected colour click on the box and uncheck mark it. Then click on “Apply”.

There you have it. Pretty simple. The trick is to make sure your scan gets as clean an image as it can. Try to get the edges as solid as possible. It will help you in the long run.
My next article will follow up on this technique by accomplishing the same results but in Corel Photopaint