How do you select just people in PS? TechTV use to have it

GerryDavid · Jun 11, 2004

I was watching an episode of The screen savers or call for help and they had a guest on that showed a very easy way to select just people. I did save the article but I cant find it now, and I waited to long to actually do it and I forgot some of the steps.

The way the guy did it was to go into the channels, and pick one of the color channels that had the best contrast between the people and the background. Then he would copy this channel and rename it.

He started off by selecting the area around the people and erasing it, turning the area to white.

Then using the burn tool, he would darken the area the people occupied, and using the dodge tool he would lighten the area around the people.

With this method, you dont have to go pixel by pixel and try to feather the edge. And with this method, you can get the hair line more accurately, getting just the area you want.

However the steps above is missing something, or part of it isnt correct. That or the settings of hte dodge/burn are to high or to low. Cuz when I do it, its not as acurate as it should be.

Then once your done with the burning and dodging, just drag the channel down to the selection tool and the area you want selected is selected.

I want to offer clipping images for istockphoto but when I try to do it the old fashion way with quickmasks and feathering, they say its to sloppy.

I tried to find the info on the site before they closed it down but I couldnt find it.

voodoocat · Jun 11, 2004

Yeah, that stupid G4 network bought out TechTV.

GerryDavid · Jun 11, 2004

G4 is really smart. Pay something like $200 million so you can get thier 40 million viewers to boost your g4 viewers that was at something like 15 million. then fire the cast that people were watching and replace them with your old shows that are boring and put up a site that is 75% adds. Mean while the 40 million viewers will go elsewhere. I watched the show for the photoshop and computer advice, not for the gaming. I dont know about the #'s, I could be off but thats the jist of the story, that I got from thier forums which surprisingly let the material stay on it. :0)

tr0gd0o0r · Jun 11, 2004

not to mention taking the 11 o'clcok (central) Screen Savers off the air, which was when I watched it.

StvShoop · Jun 12, 2004

arg, i wrote all this, then reread it and it sounds really confusing.

just be sure to notice what's a LAYER and whats a CHANNEL.

select the channel with highest object/background contrast, then drag that channel to the selection thinger (really helps if the person is mostly white and the background is mostly black)
now that its selected, make a solid color layer (of white). the selected area should now be the mask of the new white layer.
now put a black color layer below that one, put the two into a folder, and merge the contents of the folder.
now you have a layer that looks exactly like the contrastiest channel. you did this so you're messing around with a third party object rather than the original color channel, which would really screw things up.

from there, i dunno, i'm just playing around with it now...
the person should be white and the background should be black,
uh... when you're done dodging and burning (that's really cool btw), then go to the channels, duplicate a channel (doesn't matter which since it's all bw anyway), then make the bw layer you've been working on invisible. in the channels, the RG+B channels should be as they always were, and the new channel you made should still look bw. now you can drop that channel over the selector button thing. yay!

hope this was helpful, i'm gonna mess around with it some more

edit: i'm pretty sure this only works when the background is really black and the subject is really white (or the other way around). i tried doing it with a photo of me with my dark hair next to the bright sky and my white shirt next to the dark grass... big problem there.

StvShoop · Jun 13, 2004

it's easier than i thought.
you just have to find the channel with the subject mostly white and the background mostly black, drag that channel to the selection thingy, then make that selection the mask for the image.
From there, you can dodge and burn the mask directly.
again, this only works when there is a really great contrast between suject and background. Most likely you will have to do paintbrush touchups on some areas of the image.