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Evil Nemesis, someone made a mess of the original image before they posted it on santabanta. Whether you use Photoshop or any third party plug-in, you will always have difficulties with this one. Look for example at her shoulder, most definitely done by a beginner. |
I'm assuming you mean in particular the brunette hair against the yellow. If that is the case, it is largely a function of Luminosity.
Quick-n-Sleazy Down-n-Dirty
- Levels Adjustment Layer
-- Select Set White Point and click on a high yellow in the background
-- Select Set Black Point and click on a medium yellow in her hair
You should now be looking at super contrast.
Now for the Luminosity part.
- New Layer
- Fill it with any shade of grey you want
- Set blending mode to Saturation
Up to here is what is in the attachment. I did take it a little further with some minor touch-up painting and I was pleased with the results. All that was really left was to tweak the hair a bit to take care of 'colour bleeding'.
Not too hard.
Then use whatever techniques for the rest and stitch them together.
Personally, I would just paint the rest out.
If all you want is the girl from the photo, then the Pen/Path tools will work very well, and it won't be a difficult task either. It's all pretty much just cleanlines; i.e. no frizzy flyaway hair or anything.
Give it a try Evil. [righton]
[[[EDIT]]]
Damn you snuck in there on me Stroker! [bustagut] Nice solution. I like the 'Levels' part especially. Good thinkin'. :}
Looks to me like the Green channel would have worked pretty much the same, but showing RGB <> Lum is more edifying. The basic idea of RGB <> Lum has many more uses.
I actually did a filter called Uber Contrast for just this kind of thing. Pretty much like Levels, but with a few extras that I wanted. For example, you can look at the individual channels instead of eyeballing a histogram. Can even rearrange sliders by channel or by colour depending on preference.
Maybe someday I'll finish it up and release it.
Or mabye I'll do another filter to pump up contrast based on RYGCBM and Lum.
Or something. Um... yeah.
Knockout 2 is good but its not perfect...not simple
If you are hoping that knockout is going to save you hours of masking I don't think it will. I've used it many time over ther years and I always had to do it again by masking..or spend hours cleaning up the edges that knockout left. (Knockout does do smoke really well!)
It's better then PS extract.... but extract works pretty well if you duplicate the layer 3 to 5 time once extracted, merge, then clean it up with the history brush.
I've included the picture done with extract and clean up useing PS tools...and placed it against the worst background imaginable, black.
With a light background it's a breeze.
Don't try this black background with knockout... you'll cry.
Could I have worked the fly away hair using a softer history brush, yes but I think you can see my point.
Difficult Extraction 
Any Idea how to extract the girl ? from the picture.
Linear Mode
