photoshop people.. help?

Hey do you know if there is anyway to take out a color from an image, like say you have a blue image but it's on a black background, however you want the background to be transparent but its not in layers, and I know I can take the background out but the way this image is it's going to take forever because it is a complicated image.. An older program I had gave me the ability to set a certain color to be transparent, however I don't even remember what it was.. This is just a plain 2 color image and I wish there was a way to take all the black out.. any ideas? Or even any easier way to go about this would be awesome..

tia

The way I completely remove a plain colored background from a picture using Photoshop, is I first go to "Select All", then "Edit", then "Copy", and copy the image. Then I create a new image or file that is transparent that is exactly the same size as the image I just copied. Then I "Paste" the image I just copied on to the new transparent image. Then I use the "Magic Wand", and in this case I would click it on the black color in the background. You will notice that it all has a mask around it. Then go to "Edit", and click on "cut". It will remove the entire black background, leaving the image you wish to keep on a transparent background. Then I would save it as a PSD file.

Or you can take it to Image Ready or Animation shop or even regular Paint Shop Pro, and simply use "black" as your transparent color and save it as a gif file. Your image will look like it has a black background, but it will appear transparent on a webpage or html file.

Probably the easiest way is to use Color Range. Go to Select>Color Range; use the eye dropper to select any black area; set fuzziness to control how fine the selection is. Now that you have it selected, you can delete it, mask it, or whatever you need to do. Hope that helps!

I'd like to give you a suggestion, but it depends on a lot of things. You could use the magic eraser, you could click on "image" and "replace color" or "selective color" in the drop down list and fool around with them. You could also click on "help" and choose "export transparent image" from the drop down list, but that may be no good to you. There are a number of things, but I can't really answer without seeing the image. There could be some issues with the image that would make general suggestions useless. What version of Photoshop do you have?

Oh, also, you might try going to the Blue Channel. Since the image is just blue on black, you should be able to Control+click the blue channel, which will just load the blue portion of the image. Then Ctrl+I to inverse the selection and you have isolated the black background.