tricky "cut out" problem.

[noPCtoday]

Hi guys, this is my first post in this forum.
I was surfing around on dA and found an interesting photograph.
I was thinking it would be really fun to cut it out in photoshop.
However, it wasn't as easy as I thought, in fact, it was quite challenging for me.
So I'm asking for help here see if anyone here has solutions to it.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/14939790/

thanks in advance
-yonk

[Disjuku]

Well - I've had a bit of a play around with this image, but I don't think you'll be able to get much from it. Many of the branches are less than one pixel thick, and the gradient background makes it a bit tricky to simply colour-select.

Your best option would probably be to use the extract tool (image>extract), although this will still require a bit of manual work on some areas.

This may be a bit easier if you increase the resolution of the image before hand.

[Excruciating]

I'd try having a go with the different masks ..
Not sure which one will do you best though, but I have to go now, besides I'm not very good at working with masks.

[Isick]

Luckily the tree is a stark contrast to the background. The best I could get is a black cutout of the tree. Like Disjuku said, the small branches aren't even one pixel in width so perfect extraction is impossible.

What I did was I just upped the contrast big time, and used that black and white image as an alpha mask to extract the tree, but I made the tree black so that there weren't any of the white parts from the background. Use it if you wish:

[Medley]

Perfect extraction impossible? Psshaw !!!



Ok, it's not perfect. But Photoshoppers are the only ones who can tell.

Basically, my mask looks the same as Isick's image. When I copied the selection to a new layer, some of the background came with it. That is unavoidable, I'll grant you.

But when you get the image to the new background, go to Layer> Layer Style and add an inner glow. Make the glow the same color as the background, and get the blend mode right (in this case, Darken) and PRESTO!

Hope this helps.

- Joe U.

[Isick]

aaahhh, the old inner glow trick.
I didn't think of that, well played.

[pigbait75]

why not just use the pen tool it takes some time but you can cut it out without the jagged edges. just set the pen tool to paths and when you finished tracing it go to your paths pallete and right click the path layer and hit make selection and viola one perfect tree.

[tombothetominator]

why not just use the pen tool it takes some time but you can cut it out without the jagged edges. just set the pen tool to paths and when you finished tracing it go to your paths pallete and right click the path layer and hit make selection and viola one perfect tree.

would you want to pen tool that entire tree image? I'm a fan of the pen-masking, but on something like this it would take forever to get a quality path.

[pigbait75]

why not just use the pen tool it takes some time but you can cut it out without the jagged edges. just set the pen tool to paths and when you finished tracing it go to your paths pallete and right click the path layer and hit make selection and viola one perfect tree.

would you want to pen tool that entire tree image? I'm a fan of the pen-masking, but on something like this it would take forever to get a quality path.

Not me but if he wants it perfect its about the only way to go that I know of.

[CopperDesk]

My version:



Process= duplicate channel blue> levels> load selection> new layer via copy> manually deleted extra parts