I'm trying to do some editing for a friend, and am having a real tough time of it (ie. much swearing with no real progress).
Essentially, I am trying to cut out the individual and do a background replacement. However, I'm really struggling with the intricate selections around her hair, as she has blonde hair and is unfortunately on a predominantly white background, making selections through the standard route or channels a tough job. Refine edge (CS6) helps, but still getting crappy results.
Wondering if anyone is willing to help me out and see if they can do a better job than me? Would love to post the image for suggestions, but she's asked me to keep it out of the the general public's viewing (NO -- it's just normal portrait, not a "glamour"/nude portrait).
Let me know if you have the selection chops down and would like to give it a stab and I'll send you the image!
I' not that great at it, but I do recommend the use of a tablet/stylus if you are trying to do this sort of thing ... you can zoom in to a pixel level view and paint in a mask (a.k.a. alpha channel). Tedious, but ultimately the only way to be exact.
There are also some third-party applications which purport to help with making complex masks, but I haven't used any.
There is a youtube tut on just this, I believe it appeared around the time PS CS5 came out. Try looking for 'extract tool PS CS5' and see what shakes out.
I'm no expert at this kind of thing but you can also try to extract the whole person and as much hair as possible, then slowly and painfully use the eraser tool, set to a hardness of 0 or so, at 100% image size or more. Hope this helps!
