Avoiding Cut-Out

A Tutorial by Ed Ladendorf

Many people have problems when they move part of an image to a new background. Soooooo – I’m attempting to write my first tutorial. There are many ways to do this, and this is but one technique.

The original image is 288 pixels wide by 340 pixels high. This information can come in handy if you are trying to follow the steps in the tutorial, and you are working on an image with higher resolution. When choosing settings to use on your image, select the settings that seem to work best for your situation. Here’s what I did:

1. Carefully selected the head (unfeathered) to move onto a new background.
2. Choose Select/Save Selection. This brings up a box for saving options. I named the saved selection “head”, and clicked on OK. This created a new alpha channel named “head”.
3. Choose Windows/Show Channels – The “head” channel is now seen. If you click on the large rectangle, you will see a black and white mask (no grays).
4. Dragging that channel to the “create new channel” icon (next to the trash can) at the bottom of the box creates another alpha channel named “Alpha 1”. Double click on that channel, and name it “head blurred”. Click on the channel, and drag it onto “load as new selection” icon (left icon on bottom). You now see “marching ants”.
5. This step is optional, but it worked well on this image. Choose Select/Modify/Border, and choose 5 pixels. There are now two rows of “marching ants” 5 pixels apart (2.5 pixels on each side of the original selection).
6. Choose Filter/Blur/Gaussian Blur. Choose 4.5 pixels.
7. By selecting (clicking) alternately on the “head” and “head blurred” channels, you see the difference in the masks.
8. Load “head blurred” channel as selection, then make the topmost channel active by clicking on it. Drag the selection to the new background. This gives you the image with the halo. If you had loaded the “head” channel instead, you would have wound up with the harsh cutout look of the small head on the left.
9. Making sure that the layer is active for the moved part of the image, choose Layer/Matting/Defringe (1 pixel).

My advice – never feather the original selection to be saved. This allows you to alter the mask by duplicating the original alpha channel, and modifying it. The original is always available in case you need it.

Discuss this tutorial here