Masking people

mercphoto

People can be hard to mask. Stray hairs, stray threads on clothes. There often isn't a nice hard edge to mask off. The magnetic lasso helps, but I often find I have to edit the mask with the paint brush. Tedious.

This child was photographed against a wall. I was wanting to put in an American flag background. I didn't have one, so I settled with a checkered flag, which I did have. But you get the idea. I want to put the kid in front of something different, and have it look natural, without taking a lot of effort from me:



Would blue or green screen help? I tried the magic lasso, but the wall color matched the highlights in the hair, skin, etc. and made the selection process difficult.

TIA for any ideas and techniques.

digismile

mercphoto wrote:

... But you get the idea. I want to put the kid in front of something different, and have it look natural, without taking a lot of effort from me:

Bill,
I would also like to lose weight, but not have to diet or excercise

Seriously, your problem is all our problem. If there is one Photoshop thing that can cause me grief, it's masking. As you've indicated, a low contrast edge is hard to get really clean. You end up doing a lot of post work and it can still look bad.

Fine wispy hair can be one of the hardest things to extract and not have fringing of any kind. Unfortunately, I don't have one easy solution for you. I have collected a number of PS books over the last couple of years and each has expanded my ability/knowledge on extractions.

I also bought Extensis MaskPro software, and I have been very happy with it. The kind of extractions I have wanted to do, weren't necessarily planned and I found this software helped me in some of the harder situations. I have tried a green chromakey background once and it worked very well. You still need to light the background evenly for best results.

I don't recall the name, but there is a vendor that specializes in chromakey backgrounds with extraction software. However, I recall that it's not exactly cheap (the 5 x 7 background I tried was a few hundred dollars). But if this is something you want to do on a regular basis, it might be worth it.

Two books that I would take a look at the next time you visit a bookstore are:

Photoshop CS One on One (Scott Kelby)
Photoshop Masking & Compositing (Katrin Eismann)

Your extraction here was good. Just a couple of spots that I saw at large size, but I knew what I was looking for. I don't think the average person would even know you extracted this photo. Nice job

Regards,
Brad

flyingpylon

I would say you did a good job too. In fact, because I only skimmed your message and looked at the photo quickly, I thought you were saying you photographed this kid against a checkered flag and you then wanted to mask him! The one area that was a giveaway when I checked more closely was the hair on top of his head. It looks just a little too sharp against the background. Sorry that I don't have any quick and easy tips to provide.

cletus

I haven't used any masking plug-ins so I can't offer any advice on those... As far as tools that come packaged in PS CS, the Extract filter is the tool you want for this job. It's not the easiest tool to learn (or use for that mater). I'd look through any PS CS books that you already have and see if they cover the extract filter. If not (or if they don't cover the filter very well), I'd head to the bookstore and glance through the PS CS titles. One title that you should be albe to find that has good material on the extract filter is Ben Wilmore's Photoshop CS Studio Techniques.