How to make things transparent!
Do you have a thing? Do you want that thing as a transparent png to slap onto other things like an infinitely-copyable sticker? oh boy! you sure can!! You'll need your thing, internet access, and a browser that happily runs Photopea.
Locate your item. For the purposes of this tutorial, I have chosen a bottle of Magnesium. Find a patternless, light-colored* surface in a well-lit area. The fewer shadows projected by your thing the better. Mine won't be perfect but this is just a tutorial anyway!
Now, if we went ahead and tried to remove the background now, it would probably look weird. This is because of the wrinkles on my bedsheet!
I'm going to add a simple adjustment layer to increase the brightness and contrast, as well as adjust saturation to compensate. This should give me better results.
Sometimes, I will edit an image I've taken in Canva or Picsart because some of the tools allow for finer control, but this is just a tutorial so my work will be a bit lazy :P
Now that our image is brightened up and some of the wrinkles have been digitally ironed out, let's erase that background. Right click your image, and select "Blending options"
This box will pop up, just focus on where it says Blend if: Gray for now. Click the triangle at the white end of the gradient bar, and drag it toward the center.
You will see the whites of your image vanish before your very eyes!
Depending on the quality of image you are working on, you might not have to do much editing after this. I'm not so lucky and will need to manually clean my image up some.
Once I'm done with that, I can cut unused pixels off of my image by clicking Image at the top of the photopea window and navigating to "Trim" in the dropdown menu.
From there, you just need to ensure "transparent" and all sides are selected, then press okay.
It will automatically trim your image down for you, ready for use!
You can do the same process for things on darker backgrounds, just grab the triangle on the black end of the gradient bar instead and drag that toward the center. And of course, this also works for found images with similar compositions. Happy creating!!