IronPile

So I'm trying to take a picture of my wife and put it on a new background. Unfortunately, the picture is in black and white and I'm having so much trouble using the common tutorials to help(find best channel, increase contrast, select, color, etc). Is there a way to go about this with a black and white photo? Here's a link to the low-res photo

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y24...i/CIMG0055.jpg

Steve-n

retired_paddza

What I did was duplicate the layer, used a combination of hand painting with the brush and using curves to adjust it until I had the girl all white and the background black using the same methods as you would with alpha channel selections, then did a select all, copy, created a layer mask for the original picture, went to the channels palette and pasted it on the layer mask channel. You can then delete the working duplicate if you want.

Hopefully that will get you going since it sounds like you've tried working with alpha channel extractions before, it's basically the same method. Places like her left arm (viewer's right) you'll need to hand paint the edges because there is another person's arm that interferes... and near her head you might want to knock a couple places out by hand... but overall, just curves was all I needed. I did it on a few passes just to make it easier for me... ie... adjusted with curves, hit ok, curves again. The only reason was that because each time the curves is okayed and restarted, the curve line returns to normal and you have more fine control of where to move it, in effect giving you more control of how you fine tune the curve.

leenapink

First do only the head since the body can be pulled out with the pentool super clean.
If you use the level adjustment and pull the Grey to the left the hair becomes very manageable.
Darken the background with the burn tool set to shadow 25%, then do the person with the dodge tool set to highlight 12-15% you can zip right over the edges since it only lightens the light areas. Second image is the result of the dodge and burn.
Then make a channel mask...apply the mask to the main image.

Since you probably won't place the image on a single color background it will look even better.

If you use the level like we started you could probably do a OK job with the extract tool since the hail is fairly defined.

Lasa