Guys and Galls,

Watching the WWW and especially this site you see pictures where the subjects have been substracted (cut) from another original picture and pasted into a new picture. Just look at this picture (yes it's from the Eric "The Modelbouwer" Sikkema feature :



How does one create such a sharp edge without the loss of the main subject or with too much background in it ?? Is there a special cutting technique, is it blendig or..... what ?

Please reveal your secrets here....

Eagle, it will depend on what photo editing program you use because their all different. In photoshop there are a couple of ways to do it depending on how complex the outline is that you want to cut around on. The first is the 'lasso tool' that enables you to draw around the area you want to keep and then you copy and paste the area that is inside the lasso. The second is the 'Extract' tool. This is more accurate than the lasso tool in my opinion but can be very time consuming depending on the complexity. With extract you can use various size brushes to outline the area you want to keep. The advantage of the brushes is that they will allow you to get into the small cracks and crevices of the outline. Once the outline is finished you use a 'fill' tool to fill in the area you wish to keep. Then you click 'ok' and the only part of the pic left is the area you outlined and filled in.

Like I said, there are other ways and different programs do it different ways.

Danny,
The image you show above was actually shot on a creme or off-white background and I just brightened and raised the contrast to the point that most of the background was white. Then I just remove any small areas that might be too dark. I will post a short feature about your actual question though as I am sure more people would like to know a few of our "trade" secrets.

Jim

Bryan,

I use various photo editing proggies like Photoshop, PhotoImpact (my favourite) etc. I tried lasso tools and substracting a couple of times, but none of my attempts satisfied me. May be it's like modeling.... practice and patience....

Jim,

Thanks... that's appreciated very much !! Looking forward to that feature !

Jim,
I don't like the lasso tool either and use the image extraction tool instead if I absolutely have to remove part of a pic. If I can get away with it I may try a layer mask instead depending on the effect I'm going for.

Bryan,
Lol...I think you mean to direct that to Danny (above). You had me really confused there for a minute.

I put up a mini-article on improving basic image quality. I will follow this up at some point with one that talks about masking out a subject and removing the background in order to either gain a white background or insert another photographic one. That is if someone doesn't beat me to it.

Cheers,
Jim

uh Yeah, I think your right JIm...lol!