Improvement needed to extract part of image!

[greenmorpher]

I'm taking the girl I've photographed for my current assignment (See "Change color of an earring") and extracting her from the background.

Autoeraser, Quick Selection, and Border Matting give me some assistance with the job, but they really need to be improved, particularly Border Matting.

One hates to raise the horrible head of PS, but it does have a tool . . .

Cheers, geoff

Geoffrey Heard
The Ad-Doctor-Online
http://www.ad-doctor-online.com

[Hoogo]

One hates to raise the horrible head of PS, but it does have a tool . . .

Which one, and does it really work better?

[Juan]

I don´t know, I have been getting excellent results with PL, but I would agree that the workflow to extract the image is not so user friendly, would be great to merge all the steps in only one tool.

Cheers
Juan

[greenmorpher]

One hates to raise the horrible head of PS, but it does have a tool . . .

Which one, and does it really work better?

I don’t know what it's called, Hoogo, but I saw a demo of it on the internet a while back and I was hoping that was what we were getting with the Border Matting tool.

Is it the Magic Extractor? What I remember goes beyond what I see on the net about that.

In the demo I saw, a bride with a gauzy veil and flying hair was lifted out of a quite complex background very cleanly. It involved multiple applications of the tool to refine the selection. I think it might even be available in PS Elements.

Cheers, geoff

[OldRadioGuy]

I don´t know, I have been getting excellent results with PL, but I would agree that the workflow to extract the image is not so user friendly, would be great to merge all the steps in only one tool.

Cheers
Juan

Juan, I agree. For most situations the PL Quick Selection tool does an excellent job -- as good as any I've tried. However, if the task involves hair, soap bubbles, wedding veils and similar transparent edges one has to call upon a second tool -- Border Matting. This process of having to rely on two tools is certainly not user friendly, and I've seen no good English explanation of how to use Border Matting effectively.

Dealing with hair and semi-transparent situations cannot be done quickly with any tool. A good job requires a lot of time. There are several plug-ins that are much better!

Bob

[greenmorpher]

Here's the key bit for his picture -- there were some others, but this is the part that I rally can’t do anything about. I can't see how to resolve this bit; there's just no way I can get the background color disentangled from the hair that I can see.

In the end, I extracted the girl from the background using the old tried and true process of setting up a vector outline, converting that to a lasso, and deleting the selection. Slow and it means I had to cut off errant hair -- but with the braids there wasn't a lot of it. There will be in pix I will be taking at the end sitting, however.

Further, while I could do this in PL, I switched to Canvas -- I've done a lot of this in Canvas over the years, and it is still my program of choice for many things, including setting up the packaging that this picture is part of. I had been hoping PL would offer me a better choice with the Border Matting tool, but it seems not.

Cheers, geoff

[OldRadioGuy]

Here's the key bit for his picture -- there were some others, but this is the part that I rally can’t do anything about. I can't see how to resolve this bit; there's just no way I can get the background color disentangled from the hair that I can see.

...
Cheers, geoff

Geoff, there are several extraction plug-ins that use a method of designating color to retain and designating color to delete in a local area of an image to deal with the color entanglement you describe. These include plug-ins from Vertus, OnOne and Topaz Labs. As I recall, all of these publishers have video tutorials to explain how this is done. None of the photo editors I have tried has a built-in tool to successfully complete that kind of job.

Bob

[bkh]

Geoff, there are several extraction plug-ins that use a method of designating color to retain and designating color to delete in a local area of an image to deal with the color entanglement you describe.

Actually, PL's "Select Colors …" works that way. Might be worth a try. I can't get it to work with percentage steps smaller than 2, which is a pity in this case. To adjust the values, it seems best to switch it to "Alpha channel" mode, but in the end, let it generate a mask and use "Extract Selection". Again, it's a pity you can't preview the results of "Extract Selection …" from within "Select Colors …". PL has a set of really powerful tools even for such difficult tasks, but they are not that well integrated.

Anyway, this looks a very hard case, and I can't blame PL's automatic tools for not being able to deal with it. Btw. is this a 100 % crop?

Cheers

Burkhard.

[greenmorpher]

Actually, PL's "Select Colors …" works that way. Might be worth a try. I can't get it to work with percentage steps smaller than 2, which is a pity in this case. To adjust the values, it seems best to switch it to "Alpha channel" mode, but in the end, let it generate a mask and use "Extract Selection". Again, it's a pity you can't preview the results of "Extract Selection …" from within "Select Colors …". PL has a set of really powerful tools even for such difficult tasks, but they are not that well integrated.

For a dumbass like me, I need stuff integrated, sadly. I tend to forget where I have been in complex actions!

Anyway, this looks a very hard case, and I can't blame PL's automatic tools for not being able to deal with it. Btw. is this a 100 % crop?

It is a very difficult one. That, of course, is the problem. If it was easy… I can’t even imagine the complexity of the programming that would be required to fix this, but I would love to have the result available to work with!

Yes, it is 100% crop, I think, Burkhardt.

Cheers, geoff

[OldRadioGuy]

Geoff, there are several extraction plug-ins that use a method of designating color to retain and designating color to delete in a local area of an image to deal with the color entanglement you describe.

Actually, PL's "Select Colors …" works that way. Might be worth a try. ...

Burkhard.

Actually, Burkhard, I have given it a try. More than once! All my attempts have been completely unsatisfactory, and I have found such an operation much easier -- make that less difficult -- to do in a good external plug-in. The English Help file is no help here.

I guess I fall into Geoff's "dumbass" category.

Bob

[greenmorpher]

Here's the completed job with substitute background.

Carefully composed with opposing lighting directions on the girl and the palm trees! What a clever idea! Anyway, it’s done and the client loves it! If anyone complains, I'll tell them this was carefully planned to add drama. In fact, I just plain didn't notice -- I was looking at the shapes.

Cheers, geoff