How to select a difficult background?

seeker

OK, so here is a picture I am doing some work on over in the "Whipping Post" thread ...




There have been a few suggestions made as to how to improve it, which I have already implemented, but the one that is giving me trouble is the suggestion to darken the background.

In order to do this, I (assume that I) need to select the background without selecting the foreground, *especially* avoiding all the fly-away hair on the girl. I have used the Filter...Extract tool quite extensively, but have been unable to figure out how to use it to avoid all those tiny little strands of hair that seem to blend right into the background.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks!

- Brian

jfriend

For this type of work, you don't have to be that accurate. The flyaway hair can just be left in the background selection and let it get a little darker - nobody will be able to tell. I looked in a lot of the usual places for a natural mask to use here (color channels, tonal values, etc...). I didn't find any natural masks because the background is pretty similar in color and tone to the foreground.

So, since the mask doesn't have to be very accurate, I just started using the magic wand with some manual touch-ups. You could even use the pen tool or just the polygon tool to outline the subject. Then, use the selection to create a mask in a curve adjustment layer. Then, blur the edge of the mask by 1 pixel (perhaps more if you are working on the original sized image). Then, pull the curve down to darken the background and then do any manual touch-ups on the mask that are needed. I used a medium sized soft brush at 40% opacity to make some of the edges around the woman's hair more believable. It's more believable to have the edge of the hair a little darker than to leave any lighter stuff in the background. Around the man's hair, you can let some of his hair darken too since with his dark hair that isn't noticable so allow the mask edge to come into his hair a few pixels.

That gave me this result:



And your original:

rutt

Well, you could do this. A made this mask from two duplicates of the B channel, inverted one, auto levels, serious curves, blurred with radius of 4, blended darken:



But that's not really what this image needs at all, IMHO. It needs pop. I ran through Dan Margulis' portrait technique, at full throttle, with a couple of minor variations and got this:



[Download and look at it in PS instead of trusting the browser. Or print it. You'll see. If the browser view is what counts, you'll definitely want to ease up on the amounts in the technique. This image is a good example of the poorly understood browser vs PS calibration lossage.]

If you think I went too far, throttle back the overlay opacity at step 5 and/or the HIRALOAM sharpening opacity at step 7.

The minor variations:

1. started with a falses profile: srgb 1.6 gamma to lighten and leave room to play
2. 1 and 1/2 passes of green luminosity blending. 1 wasn't enough to bring out the shape and 2 was too much.
3. Used Edgework's trick: inverted K channel masked L curve near the end to get deeper shadows without pugging.

jfriend

rutt wrote:

But that's not really what this image needs at all, IMHO. It needs pop. I ran through Dan Margulis' portrait technique, at full throttle, with a couple of minor variations and got this:



[Download and look at it in PS instead of trusting the browser. Or print it. You'll see. If the browser view is what counts, you'll definitely want to ease up on the amounts in the technique. This image is a good example of the poorly understood browser vs PS calibration lossage.]

If you think I went too far, throttle back the overlay opacity at step 5 and/or the HIRALOAM sharpening opacity at step 7.

The minor variations:

1. started with a falses profile: srgb 1.6 gamma to lighten and leave room to play
2. 1 and 1/2 passes of green luminosity blending. 1 wasn't enough to bring out the shape and 2 was too much.
3. Used Edgework's trick: inverted K channel masked L curve near the end to get deeper shadows without pugging.

Looks very nice overall. You got a lot of nice detail out of the girl's face, eyes and hair and I very much like the improvement in skin color.

I do think it would also benefit from a darkening of the background per the original request.

The one thing that looks a little off is the guys shirt. It seems off in both luminosity and color which seems to compete too much for the viewer's attention and I don't think represents the real color either. It's also such a bright color that it's probably out of gamut for many printers. The shirt color is so unique that there are lots of ways to treat it separately (mask or blend-if).

pathfinder

I agree, the shirt is too hot in the final version

rutt

pathfinder wrote:

I agree, the shirt is too hot in the final version

So, great, it's a reason for Seeker to do it himself and practice. I showed him the steps and told him where to fine tune.

Same with the dark background. I showed him how how to make the mask.

jjbong

rutt wrote:

So, great, it's a reason to do it yourself and practice. I showed you the steps and told you where to fine tune.

Same with the dark background. I showed you how to make the mask.

Not so sure about the mask. You seem to have nailed the woman, except for the yellowish band in the background, which masks out similarly to her hair. Of course, the man is out of it, but you can get him other ways and merge them. When I took a quick look at the numbers when this was posted, I was confounded by the similarity in all of them between the woman's hair and that yellow band in the background. Maybe it doesn't matter when you actually do it.

jfriend

Using a traditional mask
Here's a traditional edit using a manually produced mask. It would be a nice one to try Dan's portrait workflow on, but I'd already gone part way so I went ahead and finished it.

I used a combination of the magic wand, some manual touch-ups and a little blurring to create a mask of the background. Then I did the following:

• Curve on the background (using the mask) to darken the background
• Shadow and Highlights on the foreground (using an inverse of the mask) to raise shadows and tone down highlights in the foreground
• Overall S-curve to increase contrast
• Color tweak using color balance layer
• Restore blown highlights in shirt by sampling good shirt color, painting on blank layer, then using blend-if and opacity to block from areas not on the shirt and blend it in
• Make mask of the shirt from the blue channel + curves
• Use a curve and the shirt mask to darken the shirt
• Sharpen

Here's the result:


And the original:

largelylivin

A minor breach of protocol...
Hey Seeker,

I liked your photo so much and thought it had a lot of potential so I retouched it as explained below. Unfortunately, I replied in the Whipping Post and got stompped on for not knowing the protocol. Whew!

Anyway, nice pic.

First, nice moment. Looking at you and looking at her I think you must have great character. No other explanation.

I need practice retouching color (I restore B&W photos) so here's my take on adding some pop. I did an extract to separate the subjects from the background, but didn't worry about all the fine flying hairs. I multiplied the background. I bumped the color an saturation a bit on the subjects, whitened and tweaked her teeth, whitened the eyes, added a little blue to her irises - its hard to tell what her eye color is. Finally, I boosted the contrast by doing an illumination copy with the new layer set to screen.

rutt

jjbong wrote:

Not so sure about the mask. You seem to have nailed the woman, except for the yellowish band in the background, which masks out similarly to her hair. Of course, the man is out of it, but you can get him other ways and merge them. When I took a quick look at the numbers when this was posted, I was confounded by the similarity in all of them between the woman's hair and that yellow band in the background. Maybe it doesn't matter when you actually do it.

When I make masks like this, starting with color principals, it's not at all uncommon to paint on them in order to fine tune. With luck the mask gets the difficult transitions about right and the painting can be easy and sloppy.

largelylivin

rutt wrote:

When I make masks like this, starting with color principals, it's not at all uncommon to paint on them in order to fine tune. With luck the mask gets the difficult transitions about right and the painting can be easy and sloppy.

That's IS the original question - Isn't it? Thanks for reminding me Rutt.

Just to support what he said and the question that you actually asked:

As many have said here, there isn't an easy automated way for a photo with no clear color or contrast delineation between the background and the subjects. It turns out that real life photos, like this, are a tad more difficult that the usually carefully chosen examples in tutorials and texts.

This is a typical sequence and what I actually did on this retouch.

1. At first I thought the hair would be a problem so I went to the Extraction tool kind of expecting to be disappointed.
2. Examining the mask from the Extract Tool I immediately saw problem areas, mostly were where hair got confused with background colors.
3. I went to quick mask mode and manually (but quickly)edited problem areas. In the beginning I would really sweat this step. Later I started to realize it isn't quite that critical and you can always back-up if something is visible later.
3. Examined in "Channels" (so you can see the mask in pure B&W) and iterated on the quick mask until satisfied. Note that I still haven't picked up those stray hairs flying in the wind.
4. Separated the subjects and the background so that each could be treated separately and recombined in the end.......(leaving out all those steps)....
5. Guest what? The end product looks really good WITHOUT ever go back for the fine flying hair! Depending on the importance of the retouch I might choose to rework it taking a bit finer pencil to it. Certainly not for a forum and not for a $20 retouch or restore either.

DavidTO

I learned long ago from Marc Muench that masks should most often be made with an infinitely soft brush at the largest appropriate size. It's really easy.

Here's what I did.

1) Ran it through my basic Pop tutorial (on the tutorials page) in one curves adjustment layer.

2) Created a new curves adjustment layer for the background and used a large, infinitely soft brush to mask out the foreground.

3) A final curve to take out what I saw as a slight green cast.

Here's the mask I painted:




And here's my final result.

DavidTO

Just for giggles I ran this image through the PhotoPerfect default settings.

DavidTO

Sorry, one last thing with this image. I used Match Color, and a painting by Balzac to grab the colors from:



Here's the painting I used the colors from: