To fabricate uniform and reliable thin gold stripes that provide low-loss optical waveguides, we developed a novel liftoff process placing an additional $SiN_x$ layer under conventional photoresists. By patterning a photoresist and over-etching the $SiN_x$, the photoresist patterns become free-standing structures on a lower-cladding. This leads to uniform metal stripes with good reproducibility and effectively removes parasitic structures on the edge of the metal stripe in the image reversal photolithography process. By applying the newly developed process to polymer-based gold stripe waveguide fabrication, we improved the propagation losses about two times compared with that incurred by the conventional image-reversal process.