Can this be done?

Jessica

I am having the hardest time removing this HUGE COLORFUL toy from behind the cat! It's not the greatest of pictures to begin with, but the cat has since been put to sleep, so the owner would really love it if I could clean up this image. I've used all of my (limited) photoshop skills to clone out most of the toy. I can't however, figure out how to get closer to the cat without losing it's hair. Anyone have experience with this?


Thanks! Jess

Jessica

My attempt at the job
This is as far as I've gotten:

richtersl

So far, so good!

I think you just need to keep doing what you're doing but at a higher magnification level and with a smaller brush.

For example, if you zoom in 200%-300% you can really get close to the hairs on the cat to clean up that color, especially by making the brush size smaller.

jfriend

High res version please

Jessica wrote:

I am having the hardest time removing this HUGE COLORFUL toy from behind the cat! It's not the greatest of pictures to begin with, but the cat has since been put to sleep, so the owner would really love it if I could clean up this image. I've used all of my (limited) photoshop skills to clone out most of the toy. I can't however, figure out how to get closer to the cat without losing it's hair. Anyone have experience with this?


Thanks! Jess

I you can post a link to a full resolution version of the image, I'll give you some ideas/examples on how to do this later in the day.

pathfinder

I would examine this image in each of the colored channels R, G, B, a, b, C, M, Y and K and try to determine which has the greater contrast for developing a selection.

If none of the the individual colored channels offer good possibilites for Selection, then using the Extract Tool is the option of choice.

DJ-S1

Check out the tutorial for advanced masking here. Scroll all the way down, it's the last one. I think this is a similar technique to what Path is suggesting.

pathfinder

Russel Brown's video for advanced masking is perfect, and a much better explanation than mine..

Great link, rec'd highly.

SteveM

August's Rangefinder magazine did a really good article on this in their monthly "CS2 How2" feeature. Check it out, it's just what you need, including masking for "wispy hairs".

http://www.rangefindermag.com/magazine/Aug06/showpage.taf?page=90

This is something EVERY digital photographer should know.

Hope this helps!

Steve
http://www.downriverphotography.com

jfriend

Saturation mask

Jessica wrote:

I am having the hardest time removing this HUGE COLORFUL toy from behind the cat! It's not the greatest of pictures to begin with, but the cat has since been put to sleep, so the owner would really love it if I could clean up this image. I've used all of my (limited) photoshop skills to clone out most of the toy. I can't however, figure out how to get closer to the cat without losing it's hair. Anyone have experience with this?

Thanks! Jess

This image is not an easy one to build a mask for the toy. You've got lights and darks in the cat along the boundary which is going to mean that it's probably next to impossible to use any traditional color channel to construct a mask without doing the whites in a different mask from the blacks and then trying to combine them.

The A channel in LAB mode can make a pretty interesting mask, but this small version has too many compression artifacts and not enough pixels that describe the whispy cat hairs for me to actually show you without having a larger image. The basic idea is you take a copy of the A channel and apply a steep curve to separate the colored toy from the mostly non-colored cat and then create a mask from that modified channel. I'll show you the result if you can point me at a high res version.

Another very interesting possibility is what's called a saturation mask. This is a mask created from the color saturation value. Where a pixel is highly saturated, the mask will be white, where it's hardly saturated at all, the pixel will be dark. That looks promising for this image because the cat is largely non-saturated (mostly just black and white) and the toy is largely colorful and saturated. If we can create a mask that represents the saturation value, it might be able to nicely mask the toy from the cat. I'd never made a saturation mask before, so I Googled it and found this reference on how to make one. It looks pretty promising on your image, but again, I need a higher res version of the image to actually preserve the fine hairs. I'm pretty sure this would work. Here's another site that discusses the saturation mask too.

SteveM

I think there's more than ample contrast between the cat, carpet, dog and background/toy to do a regular extraction/mask technique as describe in the link above. Difference being, don't take the toy out, take the dog, cat and carpet out, rework the background, then put the dog, cat and carpet back. Easy peasy. That's how I'd do it anyhow. If you provide us with a higher resolution image, maybe we can have the Great American Smugmug Mask-Off!

Steve
http://www.downriverphotography.com