Properly removing a background

[hsanden]

I usually cut out people using the pen tool. You get very high precision and with some training it's pretty darn fast


A tutorial explaining the technique
http://www.flightsimworld.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=170265

[wannabeArtist]

Thanks, Henning!

That's probably great for people, got to try it!

But what about those fluffy hairy animals (or messy human hair, for that matter)? The pen won't work there very well, I'm a afraid, because the background gets mixed with the animal's tiniest hairs. I find, the wand tool works pretty alright, if you really drop the tolerance to zero and start picking the background spots, but that is a lot of work and really slow.

Any tips on that one?

[gruhn]

Does Elements still not have layer masks?

If not, my work around was to make a layer of the part I wanted; duplicate the layer; alt-click the gap between them in the layer list (what is doing this called?) to clip the top layer to the bottom one. Then set up an eraser and a brush and paint away on the clipping layer. Instead of black/white to mask it would be erase/brush, but it's passable. Then you can get fancy with dealing with the fuzzy bunnies.

[danlefeb]

I had someone ask me how to handle removing a background with hair so I did a quick video to help show the technique I've used before...haven't used Elements in years so it may or may not help. Hopefully it does help :)

http://danlefeb.com/index.php/2008/05/15/photoshop-removing-the-background-part-1/

[wannabeArtist]

Peter,

I'm not completely sure about the layer masks in Elements. It does have "adjustment layers", but I guess they are not the same thing. Thanks for the tip, I will try it out :)

Daniel,

That's a nice video!
You mention that you plan to do another one for the more advanced (hairy) background removal - have you do that yet? It would be great to see that!


I was pretty satisfied with the end result, although I didn't really figure out how to keep all the hair by Saturday. The bunny was actually easy, because it was a pretty small feature on the final image (book cover).

For the human pictures I just used the magic extractor tool as well as I could. This led to loosing some of the thin, loose hairs which just blended too well with the background, but I actually hand painted them back, using the pencil tool :) I did this on another layer behind the photo layer and then used the smudge tool to make them look realistic.

[Clowner]

Nice Vid Daniel it was helpful.:thumbsup:

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