How do I extract characters from artwork to use for arcade stick?

Hi all. I've been doing some thinking about changing the artwork of my fightstick to be Akira themed but my graphical skills are a little limited. I know how to use layering, apply image filters but extracting images can be a little tricky for me. I usually like to work with PNGs that have transparent backgrounds. That way, it saves me the trouble of trying to extract a character, logo, symbol etc. from a white/ background and when that logo has some white colouring and the background is white (e.g.: Akira VF5 portrait), using the magic wand tool, I can end up taking chunks out of the character.

At the moment, I do have Photoshop CS5 but I'm very new to Photoshop so I don't really know my way around it. For a long time, I had been using Paint Shop Pro 7 for any graphical work so the interface between Photoshop and PSP is very different.

So can anyone tell me the method of extracting characters, symbols, logos? I'd also like to get the VF5FS logo with a transparent background as well but I've only found the logo with either a black background or white.

 

Hi all. I'm in the process of changing my artwork of my fightstick so I'd like to get some VF imagery to use. I know of fightersgeneration.com which have some nice character artwork but I'd also like to get all the promo poster images and things of the sort to use. So can anyone recommend any good sources for VF imagery? Thanks.

 

Sorry, can the mods move this thread to the Help section of the forum? Sorry for the inconvenience.

 

Sega had a VF5 fansite kit on their website a long time ago which had very high resolution no background psd files on every character in vanilla VF5. Includes the logo too. But it's long gone now. I have the fansite kit, but it's too big to upload to sites like MediaFire. But if you tell me what you want, I can probably get it for you.

 

yo RunningWildVidya, i would love to get my hands on that kit, and I'm sure a lot of others would too. I have a pro account at MediaFire, so I can upload huge files. If I set up a file drop link, would you be willing to upload it? Then I can post the share link here for anyone to access.

 

The high resolution images in the fankit do have backgrounds, for the CG portraits the background was entirely black.

Anyway, Dropbox should be able to handle the size of the fankit, easy to use as well all you'd need to do is put it in the public folder then right click to create a link.

I think I have the VF5 fankit lying around somewhere on my hard drive I'll look into it.

 

They are on separate layers. You can enable/disable them with a single click.

Anyways, I managed to slim the rar file down by deleting a few irrelevant files, and uploaded it to MediaFire.

Here's the link - http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?38nmw3ypa8qcgv9

 

Thanks . I also found a website which has some FS specific artwork (http://segaretro.org/Virtua_Fighter_5:_Final_Showdown). The FS logo on there is in PNG format with a transparent background so it should be easy to use for artwork.