Jackson

Hello, I was asked yesterday morning to take a few pictures of a high school senior who was in a serious auto accident several months ago and did not get her senior pictures done. Since I did not have any kind of a portrait backdrop, we went over to the city park and I got some really good shots. To complicate matters. I found out just today that all senior pictures that are submitted to the yearbook must have a solid background and furthermore, the deadline for submission is this Wednesday. Im using Photoshop 7 and so far I have chosen a picture of this girl, cropped a 4x6 of her head and shoulders and have sucessfully used the magnetic lasso tool to select her out of the background. Would someone be kind enough to direct me in isolating her from the city park background and somehow, pasting this image onto a dark background so I end up with what the school yearbook requires. My thanks in advance, Jackson

gymmie

Hi, and welcome, Jackson!

Probably your best bet for this photo is using the extract tool. Here's a tutorial that gives a good explanation on how to use it.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

Make a copy of your background layer, hide the background layer, and use the extract tool on the copy. The extract tool does just that; it extracts everything but what you've told it you want to keep, and it's GONE. You'll end up with the (cute) girl against a transparent background.

You don't have to paste anything Make a new, layer underneath your newly extracted layer, fill it with a solid color, and you're done! You can now trash the background layer if you want.

Good luck, and if you have trouble, don't be afraid to ask for more help. The extraction tool can be kinda tricky.

Jackson

Julie, thank you very very much for your reply. I should probably give you some background on my photoshop knowledge. Healing brush, some basic color adjustment, cropping, sharpening and saving. I'm probably not even classified as a regular beginner yet.
When you say to "make a copy of my background layer and then hide the background layer",.... this is embarresing but I don't have any idea where to start or exactly what you are referring to. Sorry, but at my level, some sort of instruction set, where I can just follow a list of exact instructions would be ideal for me. From what I've seen and read, what I'm trying to accomplish is one of the more basic photoshop proceedures. I really have tried several things outside my normal scope and unfortunatly run into a dead end very quickly every time. Every instruction I try to follow assumes a basic level of understanding that, unfortunatly, I don't have. Thanks again for your time, Jackson

Stroker1

I have one question:
What is the background colour going to be?
You did say dark, but that's not enough. With those very nasty whispies in there, the background colour will make a difference. So far I've had some luck with a nice shade of green sampled from the background.

Stroker1

Grr! I'm hating my server right now.

Here is a quick 5 minute job, slightly sized down just to see how well that will help hide bad going ons:

Jackson

Stroker, A BIG thank you for taking time to help me out! When you have time, could you possibly outline the steps that I can follow so that I can learn to do what you did? This is a free job I'm doing for Kim, (the girl in the park), as they are close family friends. I got up early this morning worrying about this project and was extremely happy to find that you had taken time to lend your support. Jackson

Stroker1

No time for images right now. Really in a crunch. So I'll do my best to explain with plain ol' text.

Start with copying the subject a few times. Gonna need several copies to work with and one left as a back up. Add a background with the appropriate colour.

Add a Layer Mask to one and paint away. Almost all of the background, along the face, shoulder, and some of the hair. Don't paint out the whispies -- these will be done seperately.

Make a selection of some of the whispies. Prolly best to break the whispies into two chunks, but we'll deal with only one for now. Okay, so make a selection of the whispies with green in the background where the leaves (needles?) are. Use Quck Mask or any of the Marque tools. Save this selection in an Alpha channel.

Still on the subject with the selection, hit ctrl + j to copy the selection to a new layer. Add a Curves Adjustment Layer, make no adjustments, click "Okay", and clip it to the chunk you just copied to a new layer. Go back to the Curves Ad-Layer and manually pump up the contrast in each channel seperately.

That means, go to the Red channel, run your Eyedropper thingie over the subject to get the range, then move the upper range up some and the downer ranger down some. You don't have to move the points a lot, but enough to make the ranger wider. Repeat this in the G and B channels. Once you've done that, go back to RBG in the Curves Ad-Layer and widen the range one last time.

By the time you are done with that, you should have some very nice contrast between the hair and the background with a bit of fuzziness.

Remember that selection you made? Load it, and ctrl + shftt + c (copy merged), start a new Alpha channel, and ctrl + v (paste). Invert the selection in the new Alpha channel with ctrl + i (Image > Adjust > Invert). You should now have a solid base to Layer Mask the whispies.

Copy (ctrl + v) the new layer mask in the Alpha channel. Go to the Layer Mask on the subject. Now, in order to paste into the Layer Mask, hold alt and click the Layer Mask. This will show the raw Layer Mask. Then paste it in (ctrl + v).

Repeat the whole process for the whispies with the lighter yellow-green background.

I also added another Curves Ad-Layer to brighten the subject (clipped to the subject so as not to affect the background).

All-in-all, it's a pretty good technique. I've been meaning to add this to Tech-Slop (Whispies 2), but I have't gotten around to it yet. If you give me permission to use this picture, I might be able to knock out a better tutorial by the end of the day. Please...!

Gotta go, but I'll keep checking back to answer questions and to see if you will give me permission to use the picture for my tutorial.

wbiss

Welcome aboard, Jackson!

This is a difficult challenge, indeed for you (or anyone, for that matter)! It's no easy task when one has to remove a busy background and your's has been made even more difficult with Kim's "whispies". Every situation calls for a different approach and a different solution, but from reading what has been posted thus far, Stroker's approach seems best. The only problem that I foresee is that you may find it too complicated or difficult based on your PS experience. Don't feel intimidated and don't be shy to give it a try and when you're stuck, post your queries again.


Another solution? Reshoot beautiful Kim on a plain background and save yourself a lot of aggro!?!?!? [innocent]

Good luck!

Welcome to the board Jackson [righton]

It seems that you have all the answers you need. I might give this one a try too

Ok, gave it a try