Photoshop

I am not a graphics person, but, I thought this would be a simple thing to do. I want to draw an oval around an area on a screen shot for some documentation I am working on. When I draw the oval I it fills with a color. Is there a way to turn this off?

Thanks in advance.

In Photoshop? Which function are you using to create the oval?

I do it like this:
- make an elliptic selection
- Edit / Fill Border (not sure about "Border" as i am using the german version)

how about you open up good ol Microsoft Paint, and just do an easy oval there,
no need to get out the chainsaw to cut that twig

Are you editing the screen shot in photoshop? If so then you shouldn’t have any trouble. Otherwise you may run into difficulty as the PS image will export with a solid background unless you export it as a GIF and then I’m not sure if the transparent background will work outside of a web page.

In any event the oval is easy. As mentioned before you can use the ellipse marquee and make an ellipse and fill it and then make another ellipse placed inside of the first ellipse and delete it. Or another way that works good for keeping everything concentric is to make an oval brush and set the size to what you would like, with the pencil selected click once on the stage then go back to the brushes pallet and change the brush size to something smaller (consider resolution and pixel size here), with pencil still selected but using a different color (anti-aliaseing turned off) place you brush inside the first oval you created and click once. Now hit the “W” key (magic wand tool) click the inner color and hit delete. Note: make sure the “tolerance” setting for the magic wand is set very low like “1”

If you do these on separate layers you can fine-tune placement of the ovals with the arrow keys. Remember the layer that is highlighted is the layer you are effecting.

Funny that such a simple problem gets so many replies...


The background will stay transparent in any format that supports transparency or alpha channels. GIF, PNG, TIFF, TGA and some more. It does not depend on web pages. Some programs don´t support transparency, but this is broken programs. 100% not your fault .



Best way, imho "most professional" and also re-editable is using a path. there is a "elliptic path" tool. you can resize paths losslessly and they are kept if you save as PSD. They are also more than pixel-accurate (a path can be placed on quarters of a pixel eg.) and you can make a selection ("marquee"?) from a path, use anti-aliasing or not, and fill this selection then.


set it to "0" for the lowest value possible if you are not using anti-aliasing.

Yeah that’s true about the path business I’ve just never like PS’s pen tool. But that’s a personal thing having to do with learning on other programs i.e. CorelDraw where I have more control over the node editing features.

Personally, I dislike ALL pen tools...