extracted bride

[sjm]

still can't get my Mac to upload to this site, so here is the URL for my extracted bride......

http://albums.photopoint.com/j/View?u=1269000&a=9405164&p=56629665

It has lost some quality in downsizing the resolution, but I'd appreciate a critique and/or suggestions for improvements.

Thanks.

[sjm]

1 of 2 scenerios............

either my extracted bride is perfectly excuted and there's no room for improvement (not in my wildest dreams!) or it is so poorly done that the very nice experts here don't want to hurt my feelings. I tend to believe it's probably the latter.

However, I'm a pretty tough cookie and *can handle the truth* (spoken ala tom cruise in response to jack nicholson! hehehehe)

Thanks!

[George]

I am no expert, looks good to me. The one thing I believe would make it look better would be a break somewhere behind the far part of the wedding dress( a different color from the other background color) all the way across and down to make it appear she was standing on a floor. As it is now, it appears that she is floating in the air. Just my opinion.

George

[DJ Dubovsky]

Sorry SJM,
It's not that we didn't want to comment, but somehow it didn't show up until today on my screen. I love that picture. What a beautiful bride and that dress is gorgeous!
I think you did the extraction very well and avoided the cut out look. And that's the hardest part.
Now to make it look like she is actually standing on solid ground, add just a small sharp shadow where the dress hangs above the floor and be aware of your light source. Remember the dress and floor are very close so the shadow should be tight and sharp. That should anchor her down better.
Also what George said about the floor meeting the backdrop needs to be emphasized by gradually darkening it a little where they meet.
Finally, most of the train has a dark blue tint where the sheer parts show the floor and that is good, but the distant part of the train picked up some light brown hue probably from the scene it was in before. I would select that area with a very soft selection and change the color to better match your blue setting.
I think you did a beautiful job just sorry it looked like we didn't want to respond. I really do believe some of these posts don't always show up on New Posts sometimes because I've missed others before and I know I visit pretty regularly. If it ever happens again, just do what you did and bring it back into view by posting a reply to it. That worked great.
DJ

[Leerod]

I think you did the extraction very well and avoided the cut out look. And that's the hardest part.

Hi just reading your posts, and yes I agree too it is a beautiful photo. But I am interested in how you can avoid the cut out look. If you could help that would be great.

[Doug Nelson]

There's a whole thread on that very topic here

[Ed_L]

Nice job on the extraction. Nearly perfect. Debbie's suggestions should be all it needs in my opinion. I *really* like the color you picked out for the backdrop. It goes very well with the bouquet and dress.

Ed

[Leerod]

Vary your feather on the tool along with the transparency. Hair should have a high feather and transparency. Distinct edges need a very low feather and transparency. this post was written by Nik on the 14.11 in the topic "avoiding the paper doll look". Doug Nelson referred me to this

But I don't really understand this part, which I guess is the main part, can you explain how to do this in an easier way for me please...... sorry I don't mean to appear to be dense. But I certainly appreciate your help.

[Doug Nelson]

Which part is "this part"?

[Matt Elder]

Very nice job. As per previous comments, the bride is floating and needs to be grounded somehow. The picture is generally lacking some 'reality', what is the brides environment etc. Even with basic portrait photo's, there is some kind of 'cloudy' background and people are use to this. Maybe impose 'hubby' in as well but just make sure that the light sources are consistent. Just a couple of random suggestions.

[Leerod]

Vary your feather on the tool along with the transparency. Hair should have a high feather and transparency. Distinct edges need a very low feather and transparency.

Thanks for your help, this is "the part" that confuses me vary your feather on the tool along with the transparency.......

[Doug Nelson]

I probably don't understand the question. I just feather 3 pixels, regardless. That's assuming some sort of selection tool. For masking I use the soft edged brushes, which have edges that vary wildly with the size of the brush. For those I just eyeball it.

[jeaniesa]

Originally posted by Leerod
Vary your feather on the tool along with the transparency. Hair should have a high feather and transparency. Distinct edges need a very low feather and transparency.

Leerod, I think that this is referring to is the options available on both the lasso tool (for selections) or the paintbrush tool (for masking). The lasso tool allows you to set a feather distance (in pixels.) The paintbrush tool allows you to pick a brush with hard or soft edges (the softer the edge the more "feathered" the selection/mask) and also set an opacity of the brush (a lower opacity softens the brush even more).

In Chapter 2 of the Photoshop Retouching Handbook by Carol Braverman, she goes into detail about examining an image to determine which edges are "hard" and which edges are "soft". For example, the edges of a vase might be sharp (hard), but the shadow it casts might be soft. If you want to select both the vase and the shadow, you probably want to use a larger feathering/softer brush on the shadow than on the vase.

In the example quoted above, the hair does not create as sharp an edge with the background as does an arm, for example. Of course, you have to be careful that you don't feather around the hair too much - esp. if you're extracting a person to a different colored background, otherwise, you bring some of the original background along with the person.

Does that make any more sense, or did I just complicate things?

Jeanie

[Doug Nelson]

Excellent book. Too bad it's out of print. But you can find it used cheap (but make sure it comes with the cdrom, lessons pretty much useless without it).

[Leerod]

Thankyou very much jeaniesa , not you didn't complicate things, you actually explained them so little ole me can understand them.

Thanks again, very much appreciated.

But, is there a search engine on this site that you can use keywords to search for certain help topics.