I was wondering if anyone could tell me what they think is the best or easiest way to select a person off of a background. I am trying to smoothly take someone out of 2 different photos and combine the 2 into one, a closeup and a full length shot. The pictures actually have a professional background behind the person (dont worry, the person owns the negatives) and you would think it would be easy to lift the person out of the picture, but for some reason magic wand and magnetic lasso arent cutting it. Anyone have suggestions for some other ways to do this?

...cedwar

Selections are one of those areas that appears easy, but sometimes harder than they look. We are all continuing to learn better ways, and different images can mean different techniques. If you want to post the picture or a portion of it with the area that you are having the most trouble with I am sure there will be ideas. In the mean time here is a great Tutorial for Flora;

http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=120

Regards,
Roger

I recently finished a project shooting a professional motivational/organizational development speaker type guy for his promotional materials. A very animated person and the shots had to illustrate that active, expressive characteristic... so his hands and body were going all over the place... bear with me, I'm getting to the selection part...
He needed 18 shots of just him on a transparent background. I thought, "no problem, I'll shoot him against a blue chroma-key background and select by color range to punch him out of the background... but I blew it, or rather, I blued it.
I let the 10' wide seamless paper go all the way to the floor and radiused it toward him. This was not good because... it reflected a slight blue fringe on his clothing from below. The color range idea was suddenly out and I had 18 to 20 images of this bearded, spiky haired, animated guy to work on.
I went to my photoshop manual and found the Filter:Extract tool. I won't go into the hows, they are in your PS7 manual (Extract is new with PS7 I think). I will say this, once I figured the tool out I was punching out an image every 15 minutes and the customer was 100% satisfied. The tool has it's weaknesses but it's well worth having in your bag.

I hope this is helpful.
Chip

Thanks rog and chip...

I like Flora's tutorial, but then again I always like Flora's tutorials. Ill just have to play with that and other techniques a little more. Like you chip, I am trying to figure out a way to select a little faster because Id like to be able to do the same thing I did on this little experiment in a much larger quantity. It'll be a lot of lifting people off of backgrounds and onto other backgrounds in a simple collage.

That spiky-haired, bearded guy sounded like a nightmare.

...cedwar

Here is the link to Flora's tutorial (http://retouchpro.com/tutorials/?m=show&id=120) .... I have that one bookmarked as it is really helpful!

....Thank You .... :happy:

Cedwar,

I also found all of these tutorials very useful:

Advanced Masking (http://www.photoshopdiva.com/articles/Masking.pdf) by Katrin Eismann.
Extracting Hair (http://www.creativepro.com/img/story/ExtractHair.pdf) and Advanced Background Extract (http://russellbrown.com/body.html) (click on the MORE TIPS button... it's the first one on the new page) by Russel Brown.

:wavey:

Thanks Flora...

That extract command in one of the tutorials you suggested looks perfect for what Im trying to do! And this tutorial seems to explain it better than any info Ive seen before on it. Now I just need to go try it!

Im still working on better understanding how those blending modes interact with each other though. It seems to take a lot of vision and imagination to "see" ahead of time what a technique will do to a photo.

...Cedwar

Hi Cedwar,

thanks for the feedback! :pleased:

I'm glad you found something you can use!!!


Im still working on better understanding how those blending modes interact with each other though. It seems to take a lot of vision and imagination to "see" ahead of time what a technique will do to a photo.
Still working on it as well.... :D ... their definitions (Screen, Multiply...etc.) is only a starting point.... I really wish I could 'see ahead of time what a technique will do to a photo.' .... up to now I've been limited to just try and see what happens :wink:

:wavey: