Expert: LizaL - 2/1/2005

Question
Hello,
I'm using photoshop 7 (windows). I want to select a person, but her hair is almost impossible. The girl's hair is very wild, the backgroundcolor is almost white. At a lot of places you can see the background through the hair. You can see the picture on the link below.
http://www.flandersfietsen.be/download.htm

Thanks in advance
Guy

Answer
Hi Guy,

I agree with you - this task is almost impossible! I honestly think you're going to have to sacrifice at least some of the girl's hair in this picture. When you get right down to it, a lot of it could be considered a distraction anyway. Down near the ends of her hair, below her shoulder, the stray and split hairs don't really add anything to her look, or enhance the picture in any way. So losing some of that hair wouldn't be a huge sacrifice.

One way to get a decent outline and deal with her hair is to use the background eraser tool (click and hold on the eraser tool in the tool box, then select the Background eraser).

Set the options for the Background eraser to a fairly hard eraser (I used 80%), with the Limits set at Discontiguous and the Sampling set to Continuous.

Create a new layer, fill it with any color, and drag it under the layer with the girl's picture.

Now click with your Background eraser, all around the outline of her hair. Don't click and drag; it's easier if you have to undo things if you make lots of clicks instead.

Once you've finished, Ctrl+Click on the layer with the girl's picture, in the Layers palette. This will activate what you've just erased with the Background eraser, and turn what you've erased into selections.

Now go to the Select pulldown menu, and select Inverse. Hit Delete (or Backspace, depending on your keyboard), or Cut from the Edit pulldown menu. The background should be removed, and the girl's hair should stay fairly well intact.

Here's a movie of how I did this; for the sake of keeping my movie file size down, I'm only doing that wild portion of her hair.
http://little-works.com/all_experts/bkgrnd_eraser.mov

(This still turned out to be a big file! So please be patient as it loads :-) )


Now you'll need to go in and do some clean up work: You can use the Magic Wand tool to go into her hair and click on some of the obvious background areas -- which means you have no choice but to select some of her hair, but there's nothing that can be done about that, really. Anyway, once you select some representative areas of background, you can go to the Select pulldown menu and select Similar, which will automatically select areas of the picture that are similar in pixel color to what you just chose with the magic wand tool. Then select Cut from the Edit menu and you can cut those areas out of the picture.

Like so:
http://little-works.com/all_experts/select_similar.mov

You can also try the Extract... filter, which is found under the Filter pulldown menu. Here's a little movie that shows how this filter is used:
http://little-works.com/all_experts/extract.mov

As you can see, basically you paint around the area you want to preserve, using the marker tool, and then you fill that outlined area with the paint bucket tool. After that, you select OK, and your image is extracted from its background.

But no matter how you do it, this will be a challenge. Just keep in mind that you don't need every hair on her head; it'll be OK to sacrifice some of the more wild, split-looking ones.

Hope this helps, and if not, please don't hesitate to post back! Let me know how this turns out!

Lisa