Help Needed: How to extract girl from background?

[colaja]

Hi

I need help with extracting this beautiful girl from background. Any suggestions, techniques, advice is much appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[gperkins1973]

Just simply make a selection around the girl and go edit, fill then content aware. Click ok and she will disappear. Then just use the healing or clone tool to clean up. I then picked a lightish grey colour as the foreground colour and then left the background as white. Then then use the lasso tool to create a swiggly shape where the ghosting effect is and then create a layer mask. Then use guassian blue to soften the mask. Then just reduce the opacity down to around 30% and then blend it in a bit more using the gradient tool to soften the layer mask around the edges to blend in.


cheers

Graham

[Chain]

Excellent solution Graham!


How I would do it: (simple and quick)
1. Duplicate the background layer, and hide the Background (it's our original).
2. Add a new background between the two layers (I just picked white for visibility, but a dark background closer to the original will look better).
3. Make a selection of the girl. I simply used the quick selection tool. Nothing terribly accurate.
4. Make a mask of the selection by hitting the "Layer Mask" button in the layers panel.
5. In the "Masks" panel, click "Mask Edge" to refine the selection.
6. Increase the radius until the hair/fur looks good. You might want to try Edge Decontamination (In my example I used it at max strength; but I only had the lowres preview you uploaded).
7. Manually refine the mask (paint with black/white in the mask using the Brush Tool). A Wacom tablet helps a lot.

You might want to do this twice (so two layers); once for the hair/fur, and one mask for the rest (e.g. a mask made using the pen tool, or simply using different Mask Edge settings).

The contrast between the subject and background is not very high, so I'm sure you have to manually refine the mask a bit no matter the method you use. Also if the new background is very different from the original (mainly in terms of brightness) you might have to do some more work on the mask, as well as adjusting the color along the edge to get it looking good (e.g. the automatic edge decontamination I used to get it to look ok on white made the red from the gloves bleed into the hat).

[gperkins1973]

Sorry I read it that they wanted to remove the girl from the background and not just mask the girl. Must have been really early this morning. LOL

[Chain]

I thought your solution was funny on purpose. lol

Good job on the background though.

[colaja]

this is exactly what I need. thanks Chain, you saved my day

[John Wheeler]

You had me going too Graham.

Hi colaja

Kudos to Chain for a very nice result

The approach below is very similar to Chain's with a slight twist.

- Create Saturation Layer (Sat as defined by Color Picker - actions are available online for this). This creates a pretty good distinction on the boundaries. Note that the larger pixelation you see has to do with the JPEG compression of the image so it will be much easier with the original image
- Use quick select tool on inside of person
- Turn into Layer Mask
- Use Refine Mask with Radius about 1px and Smart Radius turned on and also up the contrast on Refine Mask
- Put in white background

Image below Left to Right and Top to Bottom is
1) Original
2) Sat Layer
3) Layer Mask that was created
4) Final Image

Adding tufts in strategic spots on the Layer mask would bring in a little more hair yet I did not do that step just to show what you can get with basic steps.

girl_panel_SFW.jpg

[colaja]

Thanks John, but I don't actually understand what you did with saturation layer. can you explain me a bit more?

thanks in advance!

[Chain]

The saturation layer was essentialy John doing a "color adjustment" trying to increase the contrast between girl and background. This was just to give the Quick Selection Tool an easier time finding the edges. It wouldn't have to be a Saturation layer; it could be a Curves adjustment layer, or perhaps your red channel. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

For me the Quick Selection Tool did just as fine a job without it.

(I don't know exactly what method John used to get that saturation layer; I make mine differently).

[John Wheeler]

Chain is exactly correct. There are many ways to increase the contrast with the background which can enhance the differentiation with the subject. Separate from several Saturation Layers approaches, here is just yet another with the instructions shown in the Layer Label descriptions over the resulting image:

Screen-shot-2011-12-15-at-3.19-SFW.jpg

The quick selection tool does great by itself as Chain indicated. I just like to see what is there during the selection process.

I agree, I would not worry about it. I was just sharing additional ways to increase the contrast with the background.

[Jaiah]

Very helpful