You didn't provide enough information, but as a guess, it sounds as if you loaded a jpg image, extracted from the background, and saved back out as a jpg image. Jpg does not support transparency of any kind, so when you removed the surround, the background still existed.
If this is the case, load the extracted image, then double-click the "background" layer (should be the only layer) in the Layers palette. In the dialog that appears, accept the default name or name to whatever you choose. Now you can operate on that layer (any layer named "background" has restrictions).
Now, select the magic wand tool and, holding down Shift, click in each of the white background areas to select them (Shift adds each clicked area to the selection). When you have everything you want removed selected, press Delete. This will make those areas transparent. You might want to use the crop tool at this point to crop to the desired image area.
Now, you've got your transparent background, but to use it elsewhere you will need to save to a format which supports transparency. As mentioned, jpg does not. Gif does, but it is limited to 256 colors, and its transparency support is binary-only. So, I would suggest that you save to png-24, which supports alpha channel transparency.
This format will yield a transparent background in most applications which support the png format. Most, but not all. In Internet Explorer 6 and below png's alpha channel isn't properly rendered. You can use the alphaimageloader filter for that browser. |
