I want to Clone out the light area going up from this chetahs head but the hair is in this area. What is the most accurate way to mask the hair?

Kind of hard to mask out just the right side of the cheeta and make it believable because the eye is going to compare it to the left side. Best bet is to do the entire cheeta.

I used the pen tool with short zig-zag point around the fur to create the original mask. Tweaked the mask then went into the image and selected the edge fur and did some g blurring and motion blur then sharpening along the edges. This helped blend some of the green with the fur. Might have over done it in some areas, but it's a start.

How about just selecting the area to the left of the streak (include just a sliver of the top of the head), flip it, move it to the right and blend as needed? Wouldn't that work for ya?

This was a tough mask because of the white and black hairs at the top of the head. I started like swampy suggested to make a rough selection and converted that into a mask. I then looked around various channels and thought the black channel in cymk mode gave the best contrast. I then increased the contrast in portions of that channel and added that selection to the original selection.

Russell Brown gives a nice quicktime tutorial on difficult masks which is helpful

Good one, Phil!

Thanks guys. Thats a stunner Lonnie. Could you explain that in a little more detail?
Mark

I thought that's what you wanted to do, Maverick. As far as detail, my workflow probably wouldn't help you much since I use PhotoImpact. But it's an easy enough thing to do and I'm sure any of the RP regulars can explain it to you.

Anyone wanna jump in here and get me off the hook?

This would have worked better on an uncompressed image, but came out decently here. Converted to LAB and used the L as a base for a mask just from the top of the cat's head down (convenient that the ears went from edge to edge - nice composition). Used dodge and burn a la Katrin Eisman to clean up the edge detail. In the one little spot where the background was lighter than the hairs I was trying to preserve, I made a sort of loose selection and inverted it, then dodged and burned that. The result allowed isolation of the dark background at the top, and I could carefully clone out the light streak. Carefully because the dark hairs tended to disappear into the dark background.

On an uncompressed image I could have built a mask for the entire animal based on the A, because the cat is positive there and all of the background is neutral or negative. JPEG artifacts got in the way of that because they took out too much edge detail. Blocking in the L was smaller (more luminance variation than color variation) but there was the problem of the cat being darker than the background in some places and lighter in others.

Mark,
I just used the burn tool on the light area above the head with a lower op close to the head. No mask.
Ray

Just wanted to give this a try.

dc

Some good stuff there. Thank you

Mark