AboutGlen Demers Expertise I am an Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop 7 and can answer any questions dealing with images for print; resolution, color correction, color space, sharpening and retouching. I am a prepress technician for Best Printing Online and if you want to know how to prepare your image for offset reproduction, I can help.
Experience I've been working in the prepress aspect of printing for 25 years and am currently a prepress technician for Best Printing Online I've worked with Photoshop since 1994 and have used all versions from 3 to CS3. I'm an ACE (Adobe certified expert) in Photoshop 7.0
Education/Credentials I graduated High School and took 1 year of College level offset printing course. I've attended 2 Photoshop World conferences and taken numerous seminars pertaining to Photoshop and the print industry.
I am using PS Element 7, and I am very novice at PS. I am taking pictures of flowers on a white background, but due to the light source, it is very difficult to get a pure white background. I spent a lot of time using the lasso tool and selection tool to select the flower and then change the background to white, but because of the flower petals and thin stems, it is very difficult to be precise and I ended up with jagger flower petals and stems. Is there any way that I could make selecting more precise and simpler?
Thanks very much in advance
K
Answer Hi Karsten,
There are several techniques I use for selecting objects. I'll do a quick selection of the background or foreground using the magic wand and save the selection. With the magic wand you can control the selection by adjusting the tolerance and by shift-click to add to the selection and option/alt click to subtract from it. You may have greater contrast between the flower and background in one of the color channels so you can switch to that channel to use the wand.
Switching to quick mask, you can use the brushes and lasso tools to refine your selection.
Once I have a mask of the object, I load it and copy the object to a new layer and add another new layer beneath it for my background. You can use the eraser tool to adjust the edges of your object. I usually set the eraser to a brush so I can have fuzzy edges if I need them.
You can then add a drop shadow effect to your object layer for added realism.
I see that Elements 7 has a Magic Extractor that appears to be similar to the Extract filter in Photoshop, this is a great tool for extracting images from a background. Work on a copy of you image in case you need to clone areas back in once it's extracted.
Hope this helps,
Glen Demers
Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop 7
Prepress Technician, Best Printing Online
www.bestprintingonline.com
