Hair And Shadow Problem

[Romany]

Hi All
I am speeding along with all the help from this forum and other tut's, but there is one problem I seem to have difficulty with, I have a photo of my little boy shown below, and I am trying extract the hair, but each time I try I can't seem to get a perfect extraction, there is also the problem of the shadow on the left hand side.
I have read a few tut's but I still cannot seem to get rid of all the colours in the background, any instructions would be grateful.
Thanks Again
Chris

[Duv]

I'm having trouble also extracting the fine hairs. This is the best I can do so far using the Screen Blend and extracting by way of Color Range. Hope someone has a better method.

Cheers
Dave

[Gary Richardson]

Hi Romany, This is my go. Like Dave, I have not quite got all the fine hairs.
What i did was select shadow using wand set to tolerance 5. Adjusted selection by hand. Cut shadow area. Then did an extraction using Extract, then copied extraction to new layer. Now extracted Hair from Boy using Extract.

Finally used this extraction to colour hair on boy.

[Janet Petty]

Hi, this is what I did (besides cheating that is ).

Went to red channel, copied it and created a new alpha channel. I used levels and dodge and burn techniques to make a mask, which I then loaded and pasted on the layer's palette.

Because the mask included the shadow on the boy's right side, I copied the mask then split it, nudged the right side over to exclude the shadow, and pasted the two split halves back together again.

A little cheating (see above ) with the smudge tool on the mask itself restored the finer hairs, which didn't make it during the dodge/burn process.

I've left it up to you to correct the color balance, etc.

Hope this helps,

Janet

[Duv]

4 Gold Stars and a box of Smarties to you Janet! I'm still playing around, trying some stuff with Calculations but I don't think anything will beat your method.

Cheers
Dave

[Janet Petty]

WOW thanks Duv. And the smarties are a bonus. WhooWhoo.

[Ed_L]

Excellent results Janet! I tried this pretty close to your technique, but what I didn't do was ...

Originally Posted by Janet Petty

Because the mask included the shadow on the boy's right side, I copied the mask then split it, nudged the right side over to exclude the shadow, and pasted the two split halves back together again.

...
Still not sure just how you did that. My brain's not working well today. Could you explain that to an idiot?? I was able to remove the shadow by painting with white, but I didn't get the nice results you got.

Ed

[Romany]

Wowwwwwwwww....Thank you everybody, I will put these methods to the test, I have two plugins , Corel Knockout 2 and Extensis Mask Pro 3.0 which are supposed to make this type of job easier, but I still haven't figured them out yet, also I would rather use Photoshop on it's own to get the required effect.
Thanks again for the tuts
Cheers
Chris

[Janet Petty]

Ed, I'm not sure if I have the words to explain what I did. It was pretty simple to do; but words....

I made a layer mask from the channel mask and put it on two separate layers. On the top mask, I cut off the left half of it (painted it out). Then I disengaged the lock between the mask and the picture. Next I nudged the mask to where the hair and ear began thus eliminating the shadow. I replaced the lock.

I did the same with the mask just below it only instead of painting out the left side, I painted out the right. No nudging required for this step as there is no shadow on his left side.

Next I merged the two masks onto another layer and tweaked them with the smudge tool.

Clear as mud I'm sure.

Janet

[cspringer]

did the same as others and cloned some hair from the left to the right and sharpened... added background and used Paint with Light action at www.atncentral.com

[Ed_L]

Thank you Janet. That makes things more clear. I'll have to give it a try.

Ed

[Romany]

Hi all
I have had a go at this tutorial, but somehow i am missing somethine as the colour ends in red????, i must have clicked on something i shoudnt have, i will try again and let you know what i come up with.
pixeladdiction

I have quite a lot of photo's with the fine hair and shadow problem, what would be a ideal backround for Digital Photo's, is it blue?
Thanks
Chris