Cutting out difficult shapes

posted by Jaytje, Sep 20, 2006 8:06 PM — 0 comments

Ok, first of we start with a nice picture, like the one below.


With the picture opened u open up the channels palette.

Then u copy the blue channel, which is the best to do this most of the times by just dragging the blue channel to the create new channel icon.
Then just select the channel u made and rename it to anything u want, like mask. So it looks like the picture below.


It still just looks like a greyscale picture, so we have to change the levels of the picture to get a nice mask. So we go to the levels screen by pressing Ctrl+L And change the input levels and change the settings there till u get a good seperation of black and white. Black being the part that u want to cut out.


Just make sure the end result is a good black and white. If u still see spots that u want to use for the mask, just get the paint tool and choose black and paint those parts black. The picture then looks like the one below.


Now we have to make the mask ready to be used, so we have to invert it by clicking on Ctrl+i

When you are happy with the mask we can use it to cut out the part u want.
Now u have to click on the RGB channel in the channels palette. Everything u don’t want in the part u want to cut out looks red. So u can still go over the picture and with the Mask channel selected u can fix little problem areas in your mask.

After you are totally happy with the result of the mask, select the RGB channel again in the channels palette. Now press CTRL and move the mouse over the Mask channel that you made and press the left mouse button. (make sure u keep Ctrl pressed!) U will see that the part u wanted to cut from the picture is outlined with the moving snake path.(or however u call that ;)) And there u have your final cut-out!

U can now paste it wherever u want.

I decided to copy and paste it in the same picture.
After that I deleted the back ground, so I could put in a new one. See picture below.


After that i decided to put a nice sunset behind the windmill.


So i placed the above picture behind the windmill with Image -> Place and made sure only the sky was visible.


After u place the enw background u notice that the colours of the windmill are totally of with the colours from the sky, so we have to fix that.
So I did the following:

I selected the windmill and then I went to Image -> Adjustments -> Match Colour.
Then u get the next screen.


As source u pick the background, which is the Sky, and as layer u pick the windmill layer. It still looks strange so we have to adjust the Luminance, Color idensity and Fade. Just fool around with those till you are happy with the result. Then click OK.

We are almost there because the edge of the cut-out still looks rather blend. So we have to fix that to.
We select the windmill layer and then we go to Layer -> Layer Style -> Inner Shadow

We get the following screen


I set the angle to 0, set the Distance to 0, Choke also to 0 and the size to 40, then press OK, Now u get the final result as seen below.


I hope this tutorial was helpful, so let me know what u think.