Extracting

[Sonny]

What is your prefered and most effective way of extracting people/hair from a photo?

I use the Magnetic Lasso & Extract Filter. Both do a decent job, but I have the most difficult time extracting hair.

[jeffkohn]

I just don't do it, because I can't do it well enough to stand up under close scrutiny without it being obvious what was done. In that case it's just not worth it IMHO.

I've tried some of the "tricks" in some of the Photoshop books, but my experience has been that they just don't work very well on real-word shots unless you have really low standards.

[Badge]

I use the clone stamp a lot to get rid of things not wanted in a photo, but Jeff is right, if not done carefully it can look out of place. Of course it depends a lot on what is in the photo.

[jeffkohn]

Originally Posted by Badge

I use the clone stamp a lot to get rid of things not wanted in a photo, but Jeff is right, if not done carefully it can look out of place. Of course it depends a lot on what is in the photo.

At the risk of getting off topic from the original post about extraction, I've found that when the clone stamp produces results that don't look seamless, a lot of times you can switch to the healing brush and get much better results (not always though, just depends on the image).

[AjP]

it is really depend in bg, if hair is dark and bg is really light, you can create mask using brush and overlay mode, if bg is not too bring, either lasso or extract and clean it after extraction.

[Silvernic]

I love Corel Knockout. It pulls out even single strands of hair. It also pulls transparent objects, such as wedding veils, without pulling the background with it.

[Ray]

magnetic lasso? I've always thought that was the most worthless tool in photoshop, surprised you can successfully use that on hair of all things. I don't have a standard way of doing it, I use about 5 different methods, depends on the photo.

[Sonny]

Originally Posted by Ray

magnetic lasso? I've always thought that was the most worthless tool in photoshop, surprised you can successfully use that on hair of all things. I don't have a standard way of doing it, I use about 5 different methods, depends on the photo.

I'm rather fond of the Magnetic Lasso. I do not use it on hair. That would be too difficult.

Do you mind elaborating more on your different methods?