Help With Rendering

Hi guys, I'm kinda new to rendering, and am practicing cutting pretty much anything I find.
Up until now, I've pretty much been rendering relatively solid images, so the cuts would end up pretty clean.
However, with a particular logo I tried to render recently, the edges of it had some opacity on them so that it would blend with the background nicer, and I have no idea how to deal with this.
I tried erasing all the darker pixels, but I just ended up with a really choppy render.
Any tips?
this is the logo in question

http://animeseed.com/wp-content/themes/Ani...images/head.png

 

Cut it out the normal way.

IE : Pen tool.

(That or use masks/channels, it'll work well on that)

 

Yeah, but if you insist on using polygon tool, you'll have to learn to feather

 

No one ever seems to use my cheat method. After cutting it out, create a new layer and attach it to your render layer with a clipping mask. Then grab the good ol' brush tool, keep your finger on alt to keep sampling new points, and brush along the edges of your render. That's what I do to remove where the background is bleeding through and keep from losing detail.

If it's just having a segment with less opacity, you just cut it out in segments, and tweak the opacity of those areas.

 

mmm that's a really sweet idea socsaint, thanks i'll give it a try.
these darn antialiased logos are killing me

this is my sample cut

this is the original


as you can see, it's still got a bit of a black outline, and is not nearly as bright as the original, which is probably because of the 1pixel antialias feather i used.
what should i do to clean this up? especially the bits of black inside the individual letters, such as e, S, E, D.

thanks again

 

Hmm, try cutting closer and NOT using feather but smooth 1 px... Besides that I'd use the pen-tool like soc said but it's harder...

 

yea that was with the pen-tool. when i choose make selection, should it be 0pixel feather with antialias on or off?

 

If you're making a selection with the pen tool ;

0 PX
Anti-Aliasing ticked

And the only reason the original -looks- brighter is because it's on a black background.

 

This.

 

if you're good enough at photoshop you don't need a rendered image

 

Need help with Rendering? No problem, Broken & SP on our forums are the Rendering Gurus, they have been featured in several graphic magazines (not to mention, only renowned ones) and they can teach you things that no other PS pr0fessional can.

 

i have gimp

 

^ Isn't that a wonder?! J/K

Welcome to the site mate, lets hope we can help convincing you to start using PS primarily now for your graphic designing.