Hair -cut out

[dv8or]

Hi - I have a project that involves cutting out a lot of people from a variety of studio backgrounds. I have maintain a mask at the end of the process as I have some complex backgrounds to put the subjects into. Having tried a whole raft of plugins and techniques to no avail including the new cs5 refine edge tool and selection tool I am struggling to achieve a nice cutout in one go. I was wondering if anyone has developed a variation of the technique here: http://tv.adobe.com/watch/the-russel.../quick-select/ for CS5. I cant seem to find a way of using the history brush to selectively paint in the hair or the or body in the same manner as CS4....Appreciate any help....
Marc

[mistermonday]

Marc, if you have a lot of flyway hair that is againsta complex background, you are not likely to obtain great results with the Refine Edge, but it depends upon the image. Calculations and layer blending is often a better solution. If you post some sample images here you are more likely to get some specific solutions.
Regards, Murray

[Nasturtium]

have you seen this?

Photoshop Top 40 #33 - Calculations

[dv8or]

Thanks Murray,
Here is a typical image of the kind I am dealing with.....it is a low res version but you get the idea....
Marc

Originally Posted by mistermonday

Marc, if you have a lot of flyway hair that is againsta complex background, you are not likely to obtain great results with the Refine Edge, but it depends upon the image. Calculations and layer blending is often a better solution. If you post some sample images here you are more likely to get some specific solutions.
Regards, Murray

[dv8or]

Thanks for this - it looks like a good technique....quite a lot of work but I will give it a go....
Marc

Originally Posted by Nasturtium

have you seen this?

Photoshop Top 40 #33 - Calculations

[mistermonday]

Marc, if your backgrounds are gray as you have shown, then for many of your photos a fast and quick solution can be the use of the Blend-If controls in the Layer Style window. See attachments below, this takes less than 1 minute.
Regards, Murray

[dv8or]

Hi Murray - thanks for that - once you have done a blend if as your screenshots suggest then how do you create a mask from that....sorry if I am being a bit backward...
Only some of my backgrounds are grey - the rest are white but it would certainly help...
Marc

Marc

Originally Posted by mistermonday

Marc, if your backgrounds are gray as you have shown, then for many of your photos a fast and quick solution can be the use of the Blend-If controls in the Layer Style window. See attachments below, this takes less than 1 minute.
Regards, Murray

[Der_W]

If something like this is good enough for you, you could easily do it with (advanced) blending options. Takes just a couple of seconds :-).

Edit: You should take a little more effort in masking though ;-).

[dv8or]

Boy! That is quite something....I will have to play around a bit - not sure if i completely understand what you have done here but I will give it a go....
Thanks so much for the effort. Did you use the underlying layer with the blend if settings in your first post and then blend if using the red channel on the top layer with a layer mask to paint it in?
Marc
Marc

Originally Posted by Der_W

If something like this is good enough for you, you could easily do it with (advanced) blending options. Takes just a couple of seconds :-).

Edit: You should take a little more effort in masking though ;-).

[Der_W]

The top layer is the background I wanted to add in this case.
Its blending mode is set to "Soft Light" (because of the almost neutral gray on your background). I then painted with black over the layer mask of the fill layer to get the blue from the areas I didn't want and used the luminance blending from the top layer to further enhance the mask by blocking out dark parts (hair) and light parts (skin) from the red channel of the original photo.

If you're still not sure, I'll do a quick video if you want to :-).

[dv8or]

Hey Jonas,
If you have the time to do a quick video that would really help....I am a bit of a visual learner. If not then dont worry I will play around. Really appreciate the time spent on this.
Marc

[Der_W]

Hey Marc,

I put up a video on YouTube (if you want me to, I can remove it of course): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI56N3PKTMo (quality is pretty bad unfortunately, hope you still can see it :-)?)
And of course here's the PSD-file if necessary: http://www.sendspace.com/file/z5ynyb

Btw., you're not restricted to using "Soft Light", but anything harsher (like "Overlay", "Hard Light" etc.) will require a bit of a better mask ;-).

PS: Excuse my pretty slow computer. I guess that comes from copying about 200GB from one hard disk to the another while recording Photoshop ;-).

[dv8or]

Thanks Jonas - appreciated....I will give it a go later...
Marc

[mistermonday]

Marc, the blue overlay was only meant to highlight the hair for visualization. I rarely need to place cut-outs on a solid color but usually into a new complex background.
The blend if sliders can often be used effectively to mask off the hair which is usually the most tricky part of the extraction. You can use the Blend-If on a copy of the background with the background turned off. That will give you my 1st attachment. You can create a merged layer, select the hair / head and save as an alpha channel. The rest of the body has a well defined edge and can be selected with the quick select tool or pen tool or any one of a number of other tools and that selection can then be saved with the option of adding it to the previous alpha channel - so you have a full cutout.
BTW, this will alos work on white BGs or other color BGs but you will just change the way you position the slider or you may need to use one or more of the color channels instead of the gray. Blend-If sliders are often forgotten about or ignored but they can be very valuable masking assistants.
Regards, Murray

[4personnen]

Hi I'm not a professional retoucher, but how I'll do it.
1-Use the derW method to obtain a transparent background,
then make a blank new layer, fill it with white, merge these 2 layers.
2-go to the channel panel and choose the most contrasted one , dupe it.
3-go to image>adjustment curves (or whatever) to increase the contrast of the channel
4-take a brush, quite big, and paint over the inside of your subjet avoiding edges and tricky parts (eg: hair) in black (you're still on a channel).
5-refine your painting for the edges with a smaller, harder brush, still avoidind tricky stuff.
6-change the blending mode of your brush (was initially "normal") and set to Overlay- paint over the hair...the overlay mode increases the contrast, leaving the white background untouched (that why you wanted a white background at the 1st place)
7-ctrl click your channel (or click on the selection icon to produce a selection from your channel.
8-transform your selection into a mask attached to your original image.
you can now delete all the other layers...
9- you got to invert your mask but before you can refine it directing by painting Black or white on it.


But you pros may want to simplify my ways...

[dv8or]

Hi Guys - i am still battling with some of my cutouts. Thanks to all who have replied so far. I have an image here that is a crop from a Hasselblad of several people that I am really battling with. Any help would be more than appreciated...here is the download link.
https://files.me.com/marcrogoff/eq15p8
Marc

[Der_W]

Your link doesn't work for me.

[dv8or]

Sorry - try this link: files.me.com/marcrogoff/xwzrhu

[Der_W]

This one is way more though, overlay masking probably won't work for satisfactory results!

You could however try to use the black and white adj. layer with all the colors set to -200 to get a (inverted) starting base.
Or use a saturation mask (might be even better suited), by creating a new Selective Color adj. layer, setting method to be "Absolute" (in the adj. layer, not in the layer's blending modes), pull the blacks of all colors to -100% and the blacks of the neutrals to +100%.

Now proceed, as you would with any channel based mask.

[dv8or]

Thanks Jonas - will give it a go - it is a painful process with this file....
Marc