I'm trying to get used to using the extraction tool in Photoshop 7. I downloaded three images to try extracting, and two of them have been reasonably good. But I'm having trouble with this one, and I was wondering if anyone knew of a good tutorial.

Ed

OW! Just the thought of extracting that one hurts :)

I know you're hoping to learn more about extraction, but seriously I'd never consider the extraction tool for this image. Come to think of it, I rarely consider the extraction tool at all.

Great shot, though.

There was an excellent movie that ships with Martin Evening's "Photoshop for Photographers" that demonstrates a technique of using other PS tools to select the area where the extraction is to take place, saving the selection, then using a dialog box in the extraction tool to reload it, thus increasing precision and decreasing the amount of work the extract had to do.

Thanks Doug. I downloaded this image because it had all the fine hairs. And with reasonably good contrast with the background, I thought it might be fairly easy. I had considered using other avenues for extraction, but I wanted to learn about the extraction tool. Do many people use it, or is it just an overrated tool?

Ed

If you downloaded it, the resolution might be the problem. Even our Challenge images rarely have sufficient resolution for decent masking, let alone extraction.

Aha! I didn't even think about that!

Ed

I'm not an expert, but I've been trying different things and this seemed to work - it needs some cleaning up, but this technique seems to have done a good job of selecting all the little hairs....

I duplicated the background (following Katrin's advice to never work on the original background :smile:

Next, I did command+option+tilde (that's the ~ thingy) to select the luminosity of the picture. delete. Do this a coule of times until you've gotten rid of most of the background. Then I just used the eraser to remove the rest of the background and added an orange backdrop so you can see the fur better.

Margaret

Margaret,

That looks like a very successful technique. I also have her book, but didn't try any techniques other than using the extract tool. Thanks for posting.

Ed

Hi Ed:

Like you I'm not as familiar with the Extract tool as I'd like to be (think I should be). I flailed around with it a few times and for me, found it a little ackward to use; perhaps I didn't give it a long enough shot. In any event over time I've gravitated toward other techniques and tools, e.g., the "locate the color channel with the highest contrast and build a mask from it" or hauling out the big gun, Procreate Knockout.

Once upon a time I was poking around for Extract tutorials; found a couple that looked promising, so I added them to my "favorites." Have to confess my intentions were/are good, but the fact is I haven't gotten around to checking them out yet. Perhaps one might be useful to you.

http://webdesign.about.com/library/weekly/aa090501a.htm

http://www.creativepro.com/img/story/ExtractHair.pdf

http://www.soniacoleman.com/Tutorials/PhotoShop/Extract_Object/Method4/method4.htm

http://www.adobeevangelists.com/pdfs/photoshop/tipsandtricks/Extract.pdf

http://graphicssoft.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http%3A%2F%2Fps6.com%2FExtract%2Ftechnique.html


Hope one of these is helpful.

Cheers...
~DannyR~

http://www.ps6.com/Tutorials/Extract/intro.html

http://www.ps6.com/Tutorials/select.html

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/PSTV_links.html#M

Hope this helps,

Stephen Marsh.

Danny and Stephen,

Thanks very much for the links. I'll surely check them out, hoping to learn a thing or two.

Ed

-Hello,this is my first post.
-This is a nice tutorial (QuickTime movie) for extract:
http://www.russellbrown.com/tips/moviesps/AdvancedBackgroundExtract.mov

-See :http://www.russellbrown.com
For more tutorials :)

Welcome, Yubal.

For a first post, this is a valuable one. Thanks for contributing so soon after joining!

~Danny~

Thanks to everybody for the precious links!! :)

Yubal,

...I had already seen that excellent tutorial but couldn't locate it anymore ... so ... thank you very much for helping me find it again!

Ed,

this is what I got using the Russel Brown Tutorial ....

Thanks for the link, Yubal, and welcome to RP.

Flora...nice results. But then, we expect that from you. :) Thanks for taking the time to post your results.

Ed

Next, I did command+option+tilde (that's the ~ thingy) to select the luminosity of the picture.

Hi all, This thread is proving to be useful to someone who wrote to me and asked for further explanation but unfortunately I can't help off the top of my head and I can't find Katrin's book right now.

I think the example in the book dealt with selecting fly-away hair if I remember correctly.

Can someone look in Katrin's book and post the translation of the keystrokes from Mac to Windows which I should have done when I originally posted :sad:

Thank you so much, Margaret

command+option+tilde [...] Can someone look in Katrin's book and post the translation of the keystrokes from Mac to Windows
I haven't got the book on me, but I believe that's Ctrl-Alt-~ (because on most PC keyboards you have to press Shift to get the ~ character, this actually works out as Ctrl-Alt-Shift-# (or whatever is underneath the ~ -- it's a # on UK keyboards))

Thanks Leah, I got another email from the person who is in Italy and there is no ~ (tilde) on her keyboard.

Flora, can you help?

Take care, Margaret

I got another email from the person who is in Italy and there is no ~ (tilde) on her keyboard.I'm sure Flora will come up with some brilliant solution, but what I've found out in the meantime: The "no tilde" problem is one a lot of people moan about with Italian keyboards There is no exact menu equivalent of that keyboard shortcut (!?). What you could do is duplicate image -- flatten duplicate -- change duplicate to LAB mode -- drag Lightness channel from the duplicated LAB mode image to the image you're working on -- do Select -> Load Selection -> specify that channel. Or you could consider remapping the keyboard, i.e. for some physical key replace a "useless/never used" character with "~". I am emphatically not an expert on this, but there are some good explanations and links here (http://www.maths.lth.se/help/windows/keyboard/).
Looking at Flora's "Enhancing Details In Unevenly Faded Pictures" tutorial, she refers to the tilde, so either she has a cunning way round this or she has a non-Italian keyboard (of course, that's another option -- buy a non-Italian keyboard... :) )

Hi,

Sorry for getting back to you so late but I was out all day!

I work with different keyboards ... (Italian-mine, German and English (UK)-my husband's) .... so I had to memorize the different keys and their position .... (Gosh ... don't even ask about the confusion!!!! :D )

As Leah suggested, I did find a permanent workaround for the missing ~ key .... but, the easiest way for creating a Luminosity Mask in Photoshop on a PC with an Italian Keyboard is to press Ctrl+Alt+1, Ctrl+Alt+2 or Ctrl+Alt+3 ....any of these combination will work!!!

These combinations work in Photoshop only ....

:wavey:

Thanks Flora, I knew you'd have an answer!!

Take care, Margaret

Okay, I gave this a quick try...

1. Duplicated Layer
2. Used magic wand to select the various blacks in the kitten, using the add tool and Select Similar until the kitten and fine hairs were selected. (Figured selecting the blacks and inverting the selection would be quicker than selecting all the colors in the background.)
3. Inverted selection so that the background was selected and went into Quick Mask to touch up. Appled a Gaussian Blur to the selection to soften the edges and prevent jagged edges.
4. While still in Quick Mask, opened levels and moved the black and white triangles towards each other until the selection just covered the fringes of the kitten.
5. Exited Quick Mask and made a layer mask for this layer (Layer>Add Layer Mask>Hide Slection). This way you can always paint back in or out areas of the background by painting on the mask.
6. Touched up as necessary.
7. Used the clone tool and healing brush to fill in areas of the kitten that were covered by the grass.
8. Created a new layer to be the new background.
9. On the kitten layer, used the smudge tool to create some fine hairs lost in the extraction process. Experimented with different size brushes and opacities to make it look more natural.
10. Copied the kitten's eyes and placed on a new layer. Used a curves adjustment and hue/saturation adjustment to brighten the eyes. Then applied USM to sharpen the eyes.

I also did a real quick version using the extraction tool. It did a pretty good job.

I duplicated the image then chose Extract. I chose a brush large enough to cover the fine hairs as I outlined the kitten (size 20). As I outlined I just barely overlapped the edge of the kitten so that most of my brush was selecting the fine hairs of the kitten. Then I filled the image and previewed before extracting. This allowed me to fine tune where necessary.

Once the image was extracted I erased a few areas and used the smudge tool to tone down some of the rough edges. Finally I used the eraser set at a low opacity to clean up a bit more and created a new background for the kitten.

This one is a bit rougher, but if you spent some time on it, you could really clean it up and create a nice image.

I have to extract dogs, some really furry, and replace the backgrounds for magazine ads. That kitty is tougher than any dog I've had to do but my approach would be the same.

- Select the defining shape and the most characteristic little spikes and the like. Extract would work, lasso would work, I would probably use the path tool just because I'm used to it and I can pretty well draw the outline I want, it also makes keeping the closed interior gaps easier.
- Knock it out of the background and check for old background traces.
- Make a few custom brushes to mimic the different hair characteristics and then go back and add the fringe onto a touch-up layer with the clone tool. Sometimes I've used the selection channel to make a feathered opacity mask for softening the extreme outside edge of the fringe.

It's not a superfast technique but the results are good. I don't know how well this works on lower resolution, anti-aliased files. I've only done this with high rez film scans.

I've used extract to cut people out of plain backgrounds with fairly good results but the edges usually showed some of that soft fringe and the occaisional shape distortion. The images were all digital photos.

Just another perspective.