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Cut-Outs
First of all, I appreciate your help. This is a basic Photoshop question. I have several still jpg images that I’m wanting to do cut-outs in Photoshop so I can import them into Boris.
The photos were taken in a studio against a black-out syc. They are of a guy with several poses.
What’s the easiest, most accurate and quickest way to do this? I have about 30 pics to edit and I don’t want to spend 10 mins. each working on them.
I thought about doing a luma key in Boris, but elements in the photo (hair, eyes, mouth, etc) tend to get keyed out as well.Any suggestions?
Thanks!
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5 Replies
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If the image was shot on a black background this should be fairly easy to do.
The way I would approach it would be by duplicating one of the channels and using levels to create an alpha channel. Click the channels tab in the layer palette, then drag one of the channels down to duplicate it and create an alpha channel. Apply a Levels adjustment and bring the lighter areas of the alpha channel way up until they’re white (lower the white input) then raise the black input to make sure that the black background is indeed black. Cmd-click (or ctrl-click on Windows) this alpha channel to create a selection, then go back to your photo and go to Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal Selection. This might need a bit of tweaking depending on the results you get, you may need to do a separate pass for hair for example.
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-Filter
-ExtractYou draw across the edges and it looks green where you make your separation. Then it extracts for you. This tool used to be terrible in older versions but has improved. I suggest people who have not played with it in CS2 give it another whirl.
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-Filter
-ExtractYou draw across the edges and it looks green where you make your separation. Then it extracts for you. This tool used to be terrible in older versions but has improved. I suggest people who have not played with it in CS2 give it another whirl.
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Maybe I didn’t do it right, but that didn’t really seem to be any better than just copying the image to a new layer and using the magic wand to delete the black. Or even just quickly circling the images with a lasso (maybe slightly feathered). What’s the reason Extract is a better option than those? I’m not trying to be mean, I’m really curious.
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Frankly, extract isn’t a very good option as it discards image data instead of masking it (see my post about feathering an edge below). I always prefer to use a Layer Mask… always =)
And one good way to get a good starting point for a mask is the process I described in my earlier post. If you need more help/details let me know where you’re lost.
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