I rather do it the hard way, masking hair

[carl365]

OK I'm playing with the Topaz Remask plugin trial version, interesting. Although I haven't had the time to sit down and spend enough time with it yet, seems it does what the black and white mask technique does for preserving ie: flowing hair.

I guess I'm sort of odd person, I would rather learn how to do it the long, hard way, so I'll know the technique behind it rather than letting a plugin do all the unseen work. I can see it though if your doing a lot of work like in a business. (I'm just a hobbyist)

[Joelle]

Not odd at all, there is great satisfaction in achieving something the hard way

Could you post a sample of what you are trying to do?

Joëlle

[carl365]

Hi Joelle, Thanks. I get all my sample photos from Google or Bing Images, don't know if I'm allowed to post a photo from there to here. Here's a link below to the type of hair photos I'm trying to work on. The ones where there's lots of individual strands of hair flying around. In Gimp I can make B&W, high contrast, paint white areas to keep, make black areas to remove, paste this mask into a layer mask on the dupe image. I can duplicate the same procedures in PSP. My problem is with hair with a busy background with lots of different colors and shades.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sit ... lnSg7pI-8Y

[photodrawken]

My problem is with hair with a busy background with lots of different colors and shades.

You hit the nail on the head. One of my pet peeves is the absurdly simple sample images used by various masking programs/plugins to show how "wonderful" their software is. Their sample images use uniformly coloured hair (either very dark or very pale) against a uniformly coloured background (usually a clear blue sky). Those images are easy to extract using any number of techniques.

Masking is almost always not the best way to extract fine details because it invariably leaves a "halo" around the object. (You can test this by using your favourite method to extract dark hair that was originally against a very light (almost white) background and placing that extracted object on a new dark (almost black) background.)

A good extraction needs to calculate the percentages of background colour in the edges of the object and progressively remove those colours.

[Joelle]

I don't think there is a 'image police' person checking where the images come from

As Ken also mentions, if the background is busy with many colours, it's not easy to separate hair from background. Almost all those Google images have 'easy' backgrounds.
A poster in the Corel Newsgroups cnews.corel.com wanted to know how others dealt with this problem and posted an image of himself.
Here is the method I suggested.

Make a selection around most of the hair>Promote the selection to new layer.
Shift+Ctrl+P on the keyboard.
Selections>Select Color Range + sample the background colour on the open image.
Settings:

Duplicated the layer a few times as shown:

Hope this helps

Joëlle

[LeviFiction]

There are "image police" of a sort. Stock Image sites tend to use embedded watermarks or specialized botnets to find when their intellectual property has been redistributed. For places like forums this usually results in a take down notice and not a direct law suit. (though that depends on the company and the person and the country's copyright laws). For your own practice, so long as you don't redistribute most people won't actually care.

Best way to handle pointing people to specific images that you don't own, is to provide a link as you did vs re-uploading. You may never get caught, sued, or asked to pay fines for doing otherwise. But it's just a good rule of thumb. Give a link and attribution. Even better, find a website that offers stock images royalty free with certain license options. Provide link and attribution to the original then upload the result of your edits.

MorgueFile is my favorite. The stock isn't the best, though it's also not bad, but you get a lot more of the "unpolished' works as they're not attempting to make money off of them. So fewer of the perfectly illuminated individuals against a solid background.

[photodrawken]

Best way to handle pointing people to specific images that you don't own, is to provide a link

I agree that's the safest thing to do. However, I'm as guilty as anyone of using found images in forum messages. My thinking is that every definition of copyright has some kind of "fair use" clause, and using an image specifically for purposes of demonstrating an editing technique in a forum discussion should certainly fall within "fair use", especially if the posted image is of reduced size and quality. I wouldn't want to have to argue the point in court, though....

[Joelle]

I only use my own images as I take a lot of photographs so that isn't a problem.
The internet being what it is, there is little one can do about other people's images being used.
I have had many of mine 'borrowed' from Flickr, quite flattering really.
I no longer 'do' Flickr It got seriously boring.

I hope the OP manages to remove the backgrounds he is wanting to, which is what this thread is about.

Joëlle

[carl365]

Thanks all, yes the copyright thing I've learned to be careful. I used to read a blogger that quoted text from other sites and one day him and lots of others that do the same thing was sued by this one lawyer that specialized in such things. Sadly this blogger and most others had to pay out $70,000 each to settle the claim.

Yes Joelle, I've had good success with the hair and plain backgrounds, in Gimp (I first started with Gimp before getting PSP) I just desaturate, invert, threshold to high contrast, paint white and paste the mask into the image. I'm reading about another way to do it altering the RGB hoping it'll do more complex backgrounds.

All this started because I want to make a scrapbook of all my past and present pets I have.

[carl365]

Thanks Joelle for the tips and posting the images of your work.

[Joelle]

Good luck with the project.
My family yawn when they see my camera appear, but years later it is "oh yes, I remember that, how wonderful".
So keep taking the photographs

Joëlle

[carl365]

Good luck with the project.
My family yawn when they see my camera appear, but years later it is "oh yes, I remember that, how wonderful".
So keep taking the photographs

Joëlle

Yes so true Joelle. Very fortunately, I always took photos and videos of my kitties, all the way back to 1970. Back then it was all film cameras. Today with digital, you can take thousands without running out of film. I have lots of 35mm and 120 B&W negs so I recently got a negative and print scanner.
Carl