Is My Photoshop Broken?

[abrogard]

I've been sweating trying to find how to extract from the background a portrait with wispy hair. White hair. Against a pale background.
Being so new half the time I don't properly understand the instructions of the many pages I've found offering various 'solutions' to this problem.
But I work through them as best I can.
And, so far, fail.

And now I've got a couple of things happening that make me wonder if my Photoshop installation is broken.

(1) I had to find a 'feather brush' and discovered that my installation, though it shows all the brushes as available, cannot list a single brush file in the presets/brush folder. And when I put the new 'feather' brush folder that I found on the internet in there it couldn't see it either - so didn't install it. I still haven't got feather brushes. Now that looks pretty broken.

(2) I had to go round the outline with the pen tool and then just roughly through the thick part of the hair. On their web page this works fine. On my screen I get a black mask gradually covers the image as I proceed around the edge of the portrait -until eventually I can see nothing! And there's talk of 'vectors' and clicking around leads to strange problems entirely, weird things happen. Should all this be so?

(3) And I was then supposed to

"Make a selection with a feathering of 0.2 pixels to remove any harsh edges then paste onto a new layer. Reduce the transparency of the image so that the original hair line can just be seen."

I assumed this pen tool outline was a selection and did a CTRL-C and then a CTRL-V but nothing happened.

So then I got completely lost and gave up.... and came here.

Is my install broken, would you say?

Here's a screenshot of my screen at the moment:


see the wispy hair? and the pale background? right half of this photo isn't displaying.. must be some constraint I don't know about... 177kb too big? or dimensions wrong?

And even if I get this to go I don't think it will work. Does anyone know a good method to do this most difficult thing: extract wispy white hair from a pale background?

( am I a pest? )

[jerryb]

hi,
your not a pest...lol...

first on tutorials..... keep in mind, this is from expereience...lol... these tutorials they don't always tell you each step!!!! and the setting they give don''t always match the results you get, that why sometimes you have to play with the settings... etc...

i don't think there anything broke..... ver possibly a couple of things you don't understand.... and i went thru the samething myself and still have that issue....
your going to be learning a lot.... as you do the tutorials and such....
a tip when do a tutorial if there a particular step that your unfamilair with.. find tutorial that deals strictly with that... for example on cutouts they have astep for creating a mask... and let say yo don't understand... then look up a tutorial on just masking..... believe it will help you lot.....

also if there a problem following a tutorial many times it very helpfull if you put in the link to the tutorial ..... so we can follow where exactly where the issue....

ok .....
1. i don't know in what context the "feather brush " is used.... i don't know the tutorial but in most case when there talking about feather... either it feathering a selection or taking the blur tool mayb light strngth/opacity and feather around the edges....... this help make the edges of the object a little softer and makes it more natural looking......

2. on the pen tool .. what the pen tool does is create a path!! and it a what called a vector path.... you can make this into vector mask or you can stroke that path or you can convert the path to a selection (the dancing ants slang term) .. many people like to use this tool because it can give very sharp edges to work with and there is couple of other advantage.....
now generally i don't create a vector mask untill have i have created the path and then i do a right click and click vector mask ...
this is where looking at the tutorial i could maybe see what going on... looking at the the layer pallet not quite what happening or should be happening...

3. the pen tool outline/path is not your selection!!!!!! yet!! , that why the copy and paste didn't work for you...... sounds like what they want you to do.... is once you have you pentool path done... then you do right click and click " make Selection" also you should have in the window, that came up, to apply a feather value !!! at this point you will see what we call the dancing ants.. the little dotted lines.. smiling... now you can do the copy and paste...

[abrogard]

Thank you, jerryb, for your excellent and thoughtful and useful reply to my post. It helps a lot. You know over the years I've posted in many forums for help/advice/knowledge on things from welding to, now, photoshop and let me tell you that helpful replies like yours that get to the heart of the matter and understand those little difficulties that stop the beginner dead: like 'steps missed out' are few, very few, and far between.

I might sound like I'm gushing a bit but I don't think it should be underestimated the usefulness and thoughtfulness of your reply, you should be commended for it and that's what I'm doing.

Thanks!

[jerryb]

hi,
your quite welcome and thank you for nice comments..

you'll find there ways to do to get the same results...
for example there about 6 or 7 basic ways to change colors
there at least 6 or 7 way to make a selection....

and you find that depending on the image one way will work better than another..
many times i have done a tutorial and had to stop and do a another tuotiral first to understan a specific tool or effect or blend...

with selection there different ways.... like color range, pen tool, your various lasso tools, channel masking, etc.....

a couple of tips...
with selections.... there a tool, which i don't have in my old cs1, call i bleieve "find edge" or refine edge .... ... real nice in selection or correcting a selection...

also when making a selection if you use the quick mask, after the selction you can adjust/cleanup, the selection come in reall handy if you underselect or over select ...

[bostone737]

1) hmmm, not sure what is going on there. I would double check the brush folder is in the correct directory or that it didn’t get renamed or something. Check Photoshop>presets>brushes. If that is fine, u may want to try and reinstall photoshop? Just curious, do u ave any brushes that are working? Like the regular hard round brush? If so you can toggle it's softness with shortcuts. Hit [ or ] will adjust the size of the brush, Hitting Shift + [ or ] will toggle the softness, or feather it.

2) The black 'mask' is there because when you select your pen tool you have 'shape layers' turned on. At the top left of the menu bar there some buttons, if you hover over them you will see the one that is 'paths'. That option will just make outlines when you use your pen tool.

3) Jerry is right, you need to turn the shape into a selection. He is also right about looking into masks. Once you ave a mask of the selection there are further options for adjustments to the mask it's self. There is edge detection, smooth, feather, contrast, and adjust edge. There's even a brush in there that tries to find the edges smartly by just dragging it over it. You can make a mask of your selection by going to the Layer menu>Layer mask>reveal selection. Then, with the mask itself selected in the layers panel, make sure Windows>masks is open, that's where you will find the option I listed above.

This is a quick run down, I would definitely find some tutorials on it and practice. I take a look online and see if I can help u find some. Extracting hair is not easy, especially when it's almost the same color as the background, so don't get too discourage if doesn't come out perfect right away. I think the main thing to have when doing this kind of thing is PATIENCE.

[bostone737]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUUFIdAsj2o

you may have to go about making your selection differently than in this tut due to your background color being so similar to the hair, but it covers the options you may want to check out after it makes it.

http://www.photoshopforphotographers.co ... asking.mov

the way he makes the selection in this tutorial may be more applicable to you.


both are pretty good tutorials

good luck

[abrogard]

Thanks for your help, bostone, it is much appreciated.

The tutor that had the 'feather' instructions was this one: http://www.graphic-design-employment.co ... oshop.html

I've begun working through the two links you gave me but not finished yet. In fact I'm still on the first one. I haven't had much time and I'm a slow learner and this is quite a complicated subject to the beginner, to this beginner at least.

On rebooting photoshop the brushes turned up in the list of available brushes but the 'explorer' thing in photoshop still fails to see anything at all in the brushes folder. Doesn't matter. Yes, all the listed available brushes do work.

When I say 'turned up' they turned up with an error. Couldn't load. Unexpected EOF. Maybe the feathers I loaded were not compatible with CS3. Anyway I removed them and downloaded some more and rebooted after putting them in the folder and now I've got 'feathers' available. Though I'm not at all sure what value they are..

Thanks for the clues on the pen tool and making a selection. Invaluable advice, I'm stymied without it.

I will proceed with my studies....

[bostone737]

abrogard , are you on a MAC by chance?

I notice sometimes when I try to load actions or something, it opens up the actions folder...... only it's the actions folder in my 'application support' directory. So if you are n a MAC, make sure it's browsing to the brush folder in 'applications' and not in 'application support'.

Of course if you are on Windows, never mind what I just said

and remember, if you have at least 1 round brush available, you can toggle it's softness with Shift+[ or } keys and the size with [ or ] keys by them selves. It's a very good time saver

[abrogard]

No, I'm on a pc, never had a mac. Thanks for the tips...