using photoshop to make my masthead transparent

 I will be explaining how I was able to make my masthead transparent using photoshop so that i can use it throughout the magazine and not just the cover page.

 To begin, I had created a new document which I will base my masthead on

• made the background transparent so that once I crop out the part I need I wont have a coloured background to deal with

 

 I then placed my masthead at an appropriate size, this makes it much easier to work with and all the parts which need to become transparent can be highlighted.

  

 I then made a new document which included a background, this is because I recieved an error which said 'Could not complete your request because the smart object is not directly editable' and the following steps will allow me to complete my transparency.

Error message from Photoshop

 I decided to use a blue background, any colour was fine as long as it was not white. This would allow me to see the difference when I finally crop the parts I do not need.

This is how it looks after I have created and dragged my masthead from one document to the other. The white background is still visible thankfully I would not recieve an error message when performing the action.

on the new file I am now able to use the magic wand tool to highlight the area which i do not require (white background and areas in the letters 'a' and 'e') after this step i was able to drag the masthead back into the orginal document and the transparent background allowed me to save the image for whatever I may need it for.

the masthead is finally transparent and can be used in other parts of my mag