Masking white dress on white background

[petersweden]

Hi

Any hints on how to extract the white dress from the white seamless background?

[edbayani]

Re: Masking white dress on white background

Try duplicating the image and with levels, move mid slider to the right to separate the dress from the bg. You can then select the dress and model and click the original to transfer the selection to the bg image. You can also select the lower fringes of the dress so you can change the opacity when you put this on another background to make it translucent to show the new bg slightly.

[Tony W]

Re: Masking white dress on white background

Pen tool to select dress and model. Then select the areas where the background will show through the dress and select those again pen tool will probably do the best job and apply varying amounts of opacity - you may need three or more different levels depending on the number of folds you are looking through to the new background

[anderson234]

Re: Masking white dress on white background

Pen tool to select dress and model. Then select the areas where the background will show through the dress and select those again pen tool will probably do the best job and apply varying amounts of opacity - you may need three or more different levels depending on the number of folds you are looking through to the new background

Could you please explain your 2nd step about the semi-opacity part?
My method about this, which did not come from tutorial, is to select this semi-opacity part and copy into a new layer, then with Calculations I get the whole selection by adding this layer's Gray to the main selection mask.

[Tony W]

Re: Masking white dress on white background

The problem to solve is first the overall selection of the model and dress and secondly the fact that the dress material is transparent.

The transparency varies depending on how many levels of material we are looking through and hence the amount of background density/detail revealed will change accordingly.

By selecting the areas separately you can control the density of the material areas to mimic looking through the varying layers to your background.

Attached shows approximation - imagine properly constructed paths and varying density of what can be revealed

If you have another preferred method that works well then that is fine there is always more than one way to skin the proverbial cat in PS

[skoobey]

Re: Masking white dress on white background

If you want to simply make a cut-out, a pen tool will do.
If, however, you want to place the model o na new backdrop, what Tony said will work, only I would pen tool all of the portions and vary the opacity on a single mask. Once the opacity is good, you'd need to refine edges a bit.

[anderson234]

Re: Masking white dress on white background

If you want to simply make a cut-out, a pen tool will do.
If, however, you want to place the model o na new backdrop, what Tony said will work, only I would pen tool all of the portions and vary the opacity on a single mask. Once the opacity is good, you'd need to refine edges a bit.

Maybe I am wrong at some step - with this method, for the transparent portion's mask, it's opposite: the thicker the cloth, the more transparent it will be.

In my way, I'll copy 2 layers of the image, one with major body mask, the other layer, make a black mask, then select the transparent portion, ctrl+j to get a temp layer, ctrl+i to cure "opposite transparency" issue, ctrl+A, ctrl+C, ALT-select that black mask, shift-ctrl-V into this black mask, ctrl+D, then ctrl+L to lighten it up and to adjust contrast. Now layer opacity comes to handy.

[skoobey]

Re: Masking white dress on white background

You didn't need to paint, pathing is just so much easier.