Definite problem

[Jayda717]

Well first off I'm not the best person with cutting images out in the first place, but this picture is insane for me. The hair is giving me tons of trouble and I'm not quite sure what needs to be done. I've already tried finding a channel with good contrast and everything, it's just real hard.

So if anyone can give me any help, it would be greatly appreciated.

[garazon]

Hi Jayda and welcome to RetouchPro,
One easy way to get an image with a better contrast between the hair and background would be to duplicate the layer, set blend mode to exclusion and it gives you the first image I attached, This should allow you to create a mask a little easier. Along the same lines you could duplicate and screen blend a couple of times and get a decent contrasted image to work from (attachment 2)
Will that help?

There's also a pretty good thread here dealing with hair selection

[bart_hickman]

Do you have a color version? It will be much easier to extract if there's a color version. You can convert to B&W after the extraction.

As it is, roughly from the top of her head to the right, the background eraser brush works well--should work better for you since you won't have jpeg artifacts to contend with. From the top of her head to the left until you get to the bottom of the hair, simply drawing a curve along the edge of the hair is good enough. The for the ends of her hair on the left, I used a smudge brush to smooth the background texture in the same direction as the hair. Then the background eraser worked to get an initial extraction. Then I followed a defringing technique I'm still trying to refine to allow the new background to replace the shadow under the left hair--follow the thread that Garazon refers to for more info. I attached a couple of examples. I was a bit hasty--could probably do better if I had time.

Bart

[skipc]

Another approach I found effective was a threshold adjustment layer, bump the contrast, and paint out the background on the mask...skip