shooting for knockout (WAS Photoshop question

[Herschel Mair <herschelmair@xxxxxxxxx>]

The lesson to be learned here is that bright-white is a bad colour to use as a background if you're intending to photoshop a new background in.

 

The original background should be as close as possible to the intended one.

If you don't know then a grey background is best. If you're intending to drop in an outdoor image, use a dark blue background or a dark green background.

 

The edge of your subject naturally takes on the colour of the background you shoot against so when you want to drop it into a new background the the trick is to make the edge edge  transparent so it looks like it's reflecting the background. use a low opacity eraser all around the edge or select the background go into quick mask and put a blur on it. Try it.

Herschel
Deen Hameed <deenhameed@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

At 2005-06-18, 04:03:06 David Dyer-Bennet (dd-b@xxxxxxxx) wrote:

>Achal Pashine writes:
>
>> Hi Bob and everybody,
>> thanks for lots of suggestions.
>> I have put a jpeg quality source shot at
>> http://photos.yahoo.com/achalpashine in the album "for photoforum".
>> The problem area during extraction is the boundary of hair and background,
>> as you can notice the hair of the subject is very curly as well as have
>> delicate hair strands (not very visible in jpeg) that stand against the
>> background. To extract this subject to change the background without
>> loosing hair details (repeating the question for Emily) is a problem.
>
>Hair. Also tree limbs/leaves, in the other case where I often need to
>do ugly masking like this. They make an *amazing* amount of trouble.
>
>About the only thing you can do is get a good approximation from the
>automatic tools, and then fine-tune by hand. For hours.
>--
>David Dyer-Bennet, ,
>RKBA:
>Pics:
>Dragaera/Steven Brust:
>
>.

Achal, have you considered that in a practical sense, _nobody_ would remember individual strands of hair? I understand that you can't chop off whole clumps of it, but 'fly-away' strands of hair can probably be masked out without in any meaninful way affecting the portrait.

Best regards,
Deen
2005-06-18 10:00:31

Herschel Mair
Head of the Department of Photography,

Higher College of Technology
Muscat
Sultanate of Oman

Adobe Certified instructor

 

+ (986) 99899 673

 

www.herschelmair.com

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