I have just discovered this site - and WOW is all I can say!

I have a Canon 350D - and am still learning my way around it, and love to fiddle in Photoshop - so this seems to be the perfect place to be!

I have learnt so much already by just browsing - and am really wanting to learn about extractions, masks, layers etc etc.

I have been browsing THIS (http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/photo-compositing/14770-your-best-masking-techniques-2.html) thread and am learning bits and pieces - but does anyone have a step-by step type of tutorial for it?


I would prefer to learn how to use photoshop to do this, rather than buy a plugin sunch as BACKGROUND REMOVER (http://www.imageskill.com/backgroundremover/backgroundremover.html) - as I like to learn by experimenting and doing!

Anyway - I'm off to keep browsing and soaking in all the information!

Attached is an example of what I would like to extract!

scallywag, welcome to RetouchPRO.

yes, that's a good thread. there are others around on extractions also. bart definitely helped my extraction process for those difficult hair ones.

the background eraser (bge) shld be of good use on your image. there are masking techniques that might also help. i think in Photoshop it's 'quick mask'. you might want to search that here on RetouchPRO.

Scallywag, Welcome to RetouchPRO from me as well. Here is another direction to explore regarding the image you are trying to extract. If you convert the image to LAB color mode, select the B channel and do Image > Apply Image and apply the A channel to it with the Blend Mode set to subtract, you will get what could turn out to be a base mask (see below) which you can then dodge / burn or blend with itself in screen mode to produce a good black & white mask. I say "could" because if it depends on your original image. Your image has pretty strong jpg pixelation resulting from jpg overcompression. Judging from you image size (~12 x 18 ") and the fact that you were able to squeeze it into 100KB for upload, I suspect you used the highest compression (low value in the Photoshop dialog box). So I did not go any farther. If you have a good quality original file you may want to play try this method.
Regards, Murray

As Murray said, you get better results with less jpeg compression--especially in this case where the luminance difference between foreground and background isn't very large and you'll be dependent more on color differences which is exactly the sort of thing jpeg compression clobbers the most.

Still, I spent a few minutes with the BGE as described in the thread you refer to and a couple more minutes adding the layers shown in the attachment to fine tune how it blends with the new background.

-Mask from BGE is derived simply by ctrl-clicking the BGE result and adding the resultant selection as a mask to the group.
-BGE layer is the BGE result itself
-Background copy is the original copied into the group shown
-Color layer is a color blend mode layer--I painted some interior hair color on the fringe hair to remove some reflected green tint from the grass in the original
-Screen layer is a screen blend mode layer. This has the inverse of the BGE mask. This screens the new BG colors into the fringe areas of the hair much as they would have mixed if she really were standing in front of those colors. Sometimes I duplicate this layer to add more color and sometimes I turn down the opacity to add less color. Depends on the old background and sometimes on the new background.
-New BG is just the new background. For any new BG, simply copy it onto this layer and the "Screen" layer (second example).

Bart