[Spearbox]

Hey all,

I've got the picture attached (much higher res than that), and have to mask the hair properly. Normal techniques don't seem to work properly and plugins such as MaskPro fail dismally.

Can anyone suggest an effective way to approach masking something like this so it would look crisp on any background?

Thanks.

[JonoMarshall]

Normal techniques such as?

Just enter mask mode and slowly paint in the hair, go down to 10% opacity on a tiny brush if needed..?

Quick and dirty method would be colour ranging the background white, then remove her top and face from the selection and feather as needed.

[niggle]

Did you try using the channels?

It took me twenty seconds to get this using the blue channel:

[steveb]

The trouble is that there's a lot of transparency in the wisps of hair blowing around. It's true that the blue channel mask will create a good cutout in this case but if you then place the gal on a red background, the result will be very far from natural-looking.
Lots of scope here for trying various techniques to make the hair blend with the new background!

[Do Gooder]

a cut out like that i would do by do by hand - masking, erasing, blurring - take about an hour and a halfish.

sometimes the extract filter or the masking helps but they are never as good as a human when floppy bits of blurry hair are involved.

[illvibe]

what are you guys talking about?!

Just use Extract filter and do it the right way.

[steveb]

Remind me not to order any cut-outs you produce!
PS Extract and Extensis Mask Pro are for children who want to put photos of their hamster on FaceBook. Not for professional purposes.

[illvibe]

Originally Posted by Adobe

The Extract filter provides a sophisticated way to isolate a foreground object and erase its background on a layer. Even objects with wispy, intricate, or undefinable edges may be clipped from their backgrounds with a minimum of manual work. You use tools in the Extract dialog box to specify which part of the image to extract.

I've found it works pretty well for hair.

[Herr Kurm]

a tablet with proper pressure sensitivity.

[Do Gooder]

Originally Posted by illvibe

I've found it works pretty well for hair.

very good for nice sharply focused hair well contrasted against a bg. terrible for blurred shiney blond hair... but extract (or the channels as niggle said) can be a good starting point.

[Dusteh]

Selecting & Extracting Hair - Masking Tutorial - Extraction Tips | PhotoshopSupport.com

[d*d]

spot on

[Spearbox]

Hiya,

Apologies at the delayed reply - things became a bit busy yesterday so I never had a chance to return. I'll try the tutorial in photoshop support.com and let you know the results.

Mask Pro is definitely a no go, even for the simplest of tasks. I've found it pretty cumbersome and the results they achive in the demo's seem to be a bit unachievable somehow.

I'll keep you all posted. Thanks for the comments thus far.