Preview is a very useful application that comes with your Mac.

Although its main use seems to be viewing PDFs and photo files, there are lots of other features.

You can load lots of images and view them as a slideshow, create PDF documents from the Print menu, adjust the size if images, rotate, flip and crop them, zoom in and out.......

The latest version even has a Select tool which will make rectangular, elliptical and lasso selections. You can also use it to cut backgrounds out of an image with the extract shape and instant Alpha tools.

Open your image in Preview, hold down your mouse on “Select” and drag down to “Extract Shape”. Draw round your item and then, when the dots appear, drag them about to refine your selection. Hit “Return”.

Go to “File/Save As” and choose “Format: PNG”. Make sure the “Alpha” box is checked.

Use “Instant Alpha” to smooth things out and then hit return again to crop and finalize.

As you can see I did a very rough job  and didn’t tidy it up.

I’ll do this in Keynote.

This is one where I have taken a shot of the car and loaded it into Keynote as “Image Fill”.

I’ve taken a photo of Buster against a plain background and stripped it out to leave him sitting on the car.

He thinks its his car but I better not catch him doing what he appears to up to in the photo!

This image was loaded into iWeb and a drop shadow and reflection added.

A screenshot was taken and cropped.

It was then loaded into Webify, rotated 45 degrees on the X axis, exported as a PNG and dragged onto the iWeb page to replace the original.

It was then duplicated and the duplicate flipped horizontally using the “Metrics” inspector and the two images dragged together.

Finally, a screenshot was taken and cropped to produce the final image.

One of my favorite applications for cutting objects out of pictures is called Play With Pictures.

You can also use it to add objects to different backgrounds in much the same way as I have described below.