Hi Achal,
This is a tough one and there's no quick "n easy solution. The real answer lies in how you shoot. If your shooting something and you know you're goint to to drop out/knock out/deep-etch the image into another background, you need to shoot against a background of similar colour and brightness.
Your problem is that, because you shot against a bright-white background, each strand of hair has a white high light reflection around its edge. So if you try to place it against a dark background or almost any background that isn't very bright, you'll have a mountain of work to do in order to change those white high lights
However all is not lost.
I have 2 suggestions:
1. send the images to me and I'll do the job for a paltry $ 150.00 (That's the kind of work I do a lot of for photographers.)
OR
2. follow these simple instructions and you can do all that work yourself.
The wonderful thing about Photoshop is that there are always 200 ways to do anything and maybe even more for what you need to do. Usually I'd use quite a few different techniques by the time the job's done.
I suggest working with a layer mask.
- Open both files.
- Drag the foreground image into the background image (it will appear as a new layer)
- If neccessary, change the layer order to get the foreground layer on top.
- In the layers menu select "Add Layer Mask"(Or in CS 2 it's just "Layer Mask") > "Reveal All"
- In the layers pallette on the foreground layer you'll see a white rectangle. This is the mask.
- Select the Magic wand and set it to the default 32 tolerance and uncheck contiguous.
- Click in the white background of the foreground image.
- Reset your colours to black and white by pressing "D"
- Click in the white, layer-mask-rectangle on the foreground layer in the layers pallette to select the mask.
- Fill using black
- This should knock out the background and also any white in the subject.
- You can paint the stuff you want back in using white in the layer mask.
- Now, very carefully, you'll have to go round the head and fix up the hair using black and white ink (Swithch by pressing "X" using a small, soft brush set to around 60% opacity. It's time consuming but it's the only way to get a convincing job.
That being said, It may be quicker to reshoot against a more appropriate background.
Good luck.
BTW, You can email me small images (600X800) or so and If you give me a little time, I can make a pretty decent mask and email it back to you. You can then re-size that mask and use it to make your own.It may need a little work once you resize it (No charge on the first job OK.) :-)
Achal Pashine <achalpashine@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dear all, I have a photoshop related question.
I shot a portrait of a subject on a nicely illuminated white background. Now, I want to extract it to replace the real background with a digital one. Despite homogenous whilte background, I am having a very hard time to extract the subject using the 'extract' filter in PS. This is especially because the hair details are lost. Since this will be blown to at least 8X10 size (if not more), I want to be very sure that the hair details look normal. I tried to use a history brush after the extraction procedure, but it leads to regaining of some white background (everything else is transperent).
So the question is: does anybody here have a tip for me to accomplish this task. Any URL etc would help too. Someone suggested me to make masks to extract, will somebody shade more light on that, if they have experience.
Thanks for any help,
Achal
Herschel Mair
Head of the Department of Photography,
Head of the Department of Photography,
Higher College of Technology
Muscat
Sultanate of Oman
Muscat
Sultanate of Oman
Adobe Certified instructor
+ (986) 99899 673
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