Selecting a complicated & rarified object

[ehume]

I have a picture where I would like to select substantially all of a tree to put in other pictures. Here is a reduced version of the original picture:

I would like to select the tree. As you can see, the background is not uniform. Auto Selection leaves the ends of the branches unselected. I have used the Smart Section Brush to add to the selection, but that captures much orange sky and takes hours. Any suggestions?

[Kathy_9]

You could try a trial of PSP2020 and use the refine brush or if you don't want to do that try playing with Selections - Modify - Select Color Range.

[ehume]

You could try a trial of PSP2020 and use the refine brush or if you don't want to do that try playing with Selections - Modify - Select Color Range.

Thanks. It's frustrating when I can identify an object but in 2019, my powerful computer cannot.

Edit: Actually, I found that combining background eraser and the Lasso helped. When trying to select the insides, I see what the selectors are up against. As I enlarge the image to see it at the pixel level, some of the pixels are medium brown. Yet my eyes infer they are very dark, nearly black. The selection engine is not pursuing ramifications, as my brain does.

[Jean-Luc]

Try my suggestion with the Background Eraser:
viewtopic.php?f=56&t=65906#p371366
Click as many as needed in different areas (never on the tree).

[Jean-Luc]

Another proposition:

With Local Tone Mapping, increase the contrast between the tree and the sky+clouds:

Your settings must be different for your original image due to the tool properties.

Remove most of the reddish with Layer Properties/Blend Ranges.
Before to do that, create a white layer under the image:

You may also place the destination image instead of the white layer.

Merge down the result if using white layer underlying.

Increase contrast with Histogram Adjustment tool:

Remove the dark clouds with white Paint Brush and Smart Edge active.

You will end with a black and white image, easy to use as a mask or apply to the target image with Layer Properties/Blend Ranges.

[ehume]

Try my suggestion with the Background Eraser:
viewtopic.php?f=56&t=65906#p371366
Click as many as needed in different areas (never on the tree).

Thank you. I was following your suggestions in cleaning up around the tree -- trunk and branches.

It never ceases to amaze me at how much work we must do to make our pictures correspond with our brains.

[ehume]

So far, the Layers trick is the best (I haven't tried the last yet):

[ehume]

Well, Local Tone mapping made things worse, but changing the Grey channel to 0/120 fixed those clouds:

[ehume]

Well, exploring blend ranges did the trick, but it seems like it was a lot of work. And still, PSP does not know what it is looking at.

[Jean-Luc]

Maybe the Automatic Sky Replacement filter?

Ooops! Don't exist in PSP.
You must go here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45nuHfiTENk

[ehume]

Maybe the Automatic Sky Replacement filter?

Ooops! Don't exist in PSP.
You must go here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45nuHfiTENk

Replace the sky? Heck, PSP doesn't even have a polarizing filter. That goes back as far as free Nik. Or dehaze. Your suggestions on blend ranges were top-notch.

[Kazan]

I decided to use the same tree picture to compare 3 ways of extracting the tree for a new background. 1- fine brush, 2- Topaz, -3- process used by ehume. I decided to spend about the same time on each method for comparison, this implies that improvement could be done on spending more time. My conclusion is that the refine brush available on 2020 does the best job.

Kazan

[Jean-Luc]

I make a better work with the Background Eraser:

Sunset Tree-small BE.jpg (28.45 KiB) Viewed 2970 times

[ehume]

I will try again with the background eraser. But I can no longer do anything with a fine brush. I just wish PSP had a way to automagically select the tree. This is what the final product looked like:

[ehume]

Can't fix the above when I edit it. You can ignore the second pic. I took the original and applied Background Eraser to it. What it did, it did beautifully. But it is a tedious process. Here it is, partly done: