Hair blending / changing background.

[Cyberek]

Fellow retouchers.

Here is a sample of bigger image. It presents some of hairs on "grayish" background:

http://img242.imageshack.us/img242/3952/hairsample.jpg

What method would You use to mask the background and change it to other solid/gradient color or to any other "background" photography?

Will be very grateful for any answers and clues .

[DJSoulglo]

Quickmask tool.

[Der_W]

Try to select the background using "Select"-"Color Range", that should work for most of the parts.

[Cyberek]

Im searching for better way than quickmask tool or color range. They give quite good results, but bigger change of background color, they left visible cutout makrs.

Here is a sample done with color range + softlight blending mode + masking... in big zoom as it is one can see where background was changed:
http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/2706/chairtest2.jpg

[mu@mm@]

I used "background-eraser". this is best for me.

background-eraser settings must be: sampling: once, limits:discontiguous, opacity may change

[amica999]

Originally Posted by Cyberek

Im searching for better way than quickmask tool or color range. They give quite good results, but bigger change of background color, they left visible cutout makrs.

Here is a sample done with color range + softlight blending mode + masking... in big zoom as it is one can see where background was changed:
http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/2706/chairtest2.jpg

I would use channels! Have a look here: there are several masking techniques that work quite well: http://www.russellbrown.com/tips_tech.html

Duped red channel ran levels to increase contrast, used dodge and burn tools on channel copy, painted the large areas with white brush....

[mistermonday]

Creating a mask using the channels is very effective. There are many possible combinations. One example would be as follows:
Make a copy of the Red Channel in the channels palette. Then with the Red Copy active, do Image>Apply Image. Choose the Red channel as the source and change the Blend Mode to ADD. Now with the resulting high contrast Red Copy channel still active, go Image>Apply Image with the Red Copy as the source and target and the blend mode set to Color Burn. Use the lasso tool to make a lose selection of the hair below the fly-aways and fill with solid white. Now for the fly aways use a soft brush set to Overlay at low opacity and alternate with White and Black to paint the area where the flyaway hair is. The samples attached were done in 3 minutes to show an example. If you take more time and care to go over the area where haitr meets background you should be able to get a very accurate mask and you do NOT need to paint hair by hair.
Regards, Murray