Removing background

[Zear1]

Hello all,

I am new to paint shop pro and was wondering if any had any recommendations on how to completely remove the background. A project I am working on only allows me to use photographs with white backgrounds. I have tried background eraser unsuccessfully and also copying the photo and pasting as new layer on a white background, however it is extremely time consumer. I was wondering if anyone tips for changing the background on a photo like this. Thank you!

Nick

[LeviFiction]

An image this involved, yeah it's going to be time consuming. Especially between the various gaps in the wires. Did you take this picture? Or is it from somewhere else? If you took this picture, the fastest option would be go back and setup a white sheet background to remove the noisy background. Otherwise it's going to take a lot of effort.

You can start off using selections to get the general shape separated from everything else. Maybe using vectors if you need a lot of control. But the steel cage areas, that's going to take work. Hopefully the original image is higher quality than this as well.

Object Extractor (Image -> Object Extractor) might quickly separate the main body from the background. But you'll still have to do clean up and get in between the gaps yourself. Object Extractor is nice, you paint around the edge of the object you want to extract from the background, and fill in the area. PSP then attempts to erase the parts you don't want.

[brucet]

Yup. It's going to be a painful job.

I would open the image in as high a quality as you can. Duplicate it. (Layers/Duplicate). Then create a new layer. (Layers/New Raster Layer). Then move the layer down one so it's between the background layer and the top duplicate layer. Select the new layer and do a flood fill with a bright colour. (The bright colour is simply so you can see your work better. You can use white if you like but I prefer to use a colour such as bright pint. You can see what you have missed easier).
Now select the top layer. Go to tools and select Freehand Selection Tool. Then select Point to Point in the options. Set Feather and Smoothing at 1. Now zoom way into your image. Click you way around a section and double click to complete the selection. The hit Delete. Keep repeating until all your background is clear. It will take a while. So make sure you save as a PSPImage file. That way you can take a break and come back and continue.

regards

[JoeB]

Further to what @brucet said, when I do use that method I do my deletions in two different steps - perhaps because it provides me with some large, quick results that I can see immediately but also because I think it makes doing the second step a bit easier and more precise. I start by doing a rough point-to-point selection and deletion of all of the stuff I want to remove. This still leaves the job of getting in close to do the detailed deletions, but when getting in close I can still see the white/pink or whatever color showing where the transparent area is, and for some reason that makes it easier for me to get on with the close work. And having already done some major deletions (even though somewhat rough) shows me that I've already achieved a large part of my goal and now I just have the "little stuff" left to do. May just be a psychological thought process, but works for me.

[photodrawken]

It might not be as difficult as everyone is assuming.

Looking at the original image, I see that there is a distinct difference in colour between the gazebo and the background. Anytime you've got some kind of difference (of any kind), you've got a chance to get a separation without having to manually draw the edges.

My line of attack is to create a B&W image that can ultimately be used as a mask over the original image to hide the background.

The sample image is too small to get a useable result, but as a "proof of concept", here are the results from two techniques:

B&W Conversion, etc.

1. I used the Hue Editor in my preferred image editing application to darken most of the colours, except for the reds.
2. Then I used a Gray Mixer to convert the image to Black & White, darkening the yellows, greens, and blues while lightening the oranges and reds.
3. Then I applied a Curves adjustment to further darken the darks to give more separation between the gazebo and the background.

This is the result:

wrought iron gazebo 01.jpg (66.61 KiB) Viewed 5203 times

This shows some intriguing potential.

I went a bit further with that result by copying it and pasting it in as the top layer, changing its layer blend mode to "Vivid Light". Here's what that looks like:

wrought iron gazebo 02.jpg (73.01 KiB) Viewed 5203 times

Channel manipulation
Looking at the individual RGB channels, it is the Blue channel that has the greatest difference between the gazebo and the background. By working on the B&W Blue channel image, and applying a Histogram correction to increase the contrast, I got this:

wrought iron gazebo 03.jpg (78.39 KiB) Viewed 5203 times

If I use the Yellow channel of a CMYK conversion, I get a B&W image with even more separation....

I won't go further with this small low-quality sample, but I think the concepts demonstrated above show that there's a decent chance to get a good separated image of the gazebo (using a high-resolution original image) without a lot of hand-drawing.

[Zear1]

Hi Everyone thank you very much for your responses and the time you put into them. I appreciate it. Yes for whatever reason I thought there was some sort of feature that could identify the main object in the picture and at least get a cut out. I will get it done might take a while. We can't really set this thing up for white background photoshoot.

[brucet]

I'm afraid it's one of those tasks that is going to take awhile. Even with Kens suggestion there will be a lot of cleaning up to do.

Good luck.

[caspia1]

I use a plugin Topaz Remask 5. With a bit of practise it works really well.