extracting stocks

[Arika]

Welcome to the wonderful world of extracting renders. There are many ways to make a render. This tutorial is to show you different techniques to extract a render. This can be helpful in deciding how you’re going to get that render. It might take a couple of posts but we’ll see what happens. I’m going to put up some pros and cons and some info about each extraction techniques and tools.

Magic Wand:
Pros: You can select a whole group of pixels at once.
Cons: you need a pic with good contrast with the background. trial and error with the tolerance selection.

This is pretty much a quick way to remove pixels by selecting one pixel. The tool finds others pixels similar to that one pixel you’ve selected. Depending on the tolerance level, you can control how much you want. Typically, you also want the “contiguous” option selected. This will take only the neighboring pixels. Unselected, and it will take any pixels related to the one you’ve selected. Tolerance is very important. The higher it is, the more pixels it will take. Conversely, the lower it is, the less it will take. Here’s an example. I’m going to use a fairly easy pic with a decent contrast with the background.

The setting for the tolerance is at 30.

notice how pixels in her gym shirt were also selected. so far, that’s not good. So we’ll need to adjust the tolerance.

The setting for the tolerance is now at 20.

Now this is a better selection than the previous attempt. We still have to remove this in other parts but we now have a tolerance that we can use.

Magnetic Lasso:
Pros: can make getting the selection fast and easy.
Cons: dependent on the contrast between the render and the background. need some patience using it.

This tool is one of the three lasso tools. Actually, out of those three, I believe more people would use the polygonal lasso tool than this one. And I really doubt that anyone really uses the regular lasso tool for extractions. This one can be a bit quicker than the polygonal lasso but I don’t really hear many users using this tool. It can do a pretty decent job. The problem lies in that you can’t fix any paths that you’ve messed up on until after you’ve removed the render. Which means, looking back at the old stock and using the clone stamp tool to make corrections on the render.


Polygonal Lasso:
Pros: can get in very close and make a more detailed selection. You don’t have to worry about contrast.
Cons: takes up time and patience. You can’t even move the scroll bars or use the navigator.

This is probably the most common tool used by the majority of render making. Since not every render we want have a nice white or black background, using this tool can help with those complex backgrounds. The real problem is really the time it takes to do it. If you’ve screwed up a point, you can hit the delete key to remove that point. The one rule of thumb I make when using it to make a render extraction is to do it in sections. The last thing you want is accidentally closing the loop when you’re about some 80% done. And we all know how going around hair can be annoying.

Pen Tool:
Pros: very nice for cutting out renders. You can fix anchor points to get those small parts.
Cons: can’t really think of any.

I’m going to briefly talk about it since there’s already one. Basically, this tool is the best in my book. Just like with the polygonal lasso, you don’t need a good contrast. Just zoom in and make your anchor points. And what’s great is that you can adjust those points later. You can even still use the scroll bars or navigation window without a problem.

Extraction Tool:
Pros: well, it’s really made for extractions.
Cons: this can get tedious.

Hehe, leave it to adobe and have them put in a tool that is clearly made for extractions. If you don’t know where it is, it is located in the filters section. I don’t know many people that use this tool. When you select this tool, you’ll get a pop-up screen.

All you have to do then is brush around the render you want.

like so...


That doesn’t sound so tough. Well, it does take some time because you want to get as close you can get. The one i made here is just quick one. So you’ll be brushing and erasing for a while. Once you’ve highlighted around your stock, click on the Fill Tool, or press G, and click on the render. This will fill in what you want.


If there’s any of the fill in color spilling out, you need to fix that. Once you’re all set just press ok and you got you’re self a render. I really suggest you avoid this tool at all costs. There are other methods that are better than this one.

Using the Quick Mask:
Pros: you can easily see what you’re masking off in you selection.
Cons: it can take some time but not as bad as using the extract tool.

Quick masking is very useful in making a more precise selection. It’s really great when you’re using the polygonal lasso tool or magic wand. To switch over to quick mask, first make you selection. Here, I just made a crude one.


The nice thing about using quick mask, is that you don’t have to be very precise when first making a selection. Just make one as close a possible so that way, it’s going to be less work to do. In quick mask, you’re going to do the more refining work.

The quick mask is located below the foreground/background color selection, or just press Q. notice that it fill in around my selection. You can change the color, by double clicking on the quick mask icon. You’ll probably might have to do that in case the default color, which red, bleeds into the background around the render or vise versa. Now let’s go make that selection a bit better. When you’re doing quick mask, you can only work with black or white. Black hides pixels while white reveals pixels. the brush you want to use is a hard brush. Here, zoomed in near her head and I did some brush work here.


'Here, I switch back to normal mode and you can see how the original selection has changed.



Although it was at the top of her head, this tool can helpful for doing the harder stuff like hair or smoke.

Using the Clone Tool:
Pros: can be done very quickly. I mean very quickly.
Cons: have to watch the image sizes closely. And a bit of cleaning up, too.

It’s sort more or less an extraction tool. Ok fine, it’s not really an extraction tool but wait, there’s more. The clone stamp tool is old bread and butter to photo editing. It’s probably still used along with newer tools like the healing brush. The basic idea is that you can duplicate the same pixels in another place. What’s great is that you can use one workspace’s image and use that in another workspace. Pretty neat, ne? When using this tool, make sure you’re using a soft tip brush and not a hard edge. Well, I guess you can use a hard edge but you’ll have to soften those straight edges afterwards. You could also use a grunge brush too but that’s another story.

I’m going to use this pic of Etna from Disgaea, awesome game by that way and I can’t wait for the sequel, too.

I resized this too from the 1028x742 to a 267x200. I’ll explain why later. Now with you pc users, go ahead and select the clone stamp too or press S. If you’re going to use the hotkey, make it looks like this, .Pressing it again will select the clone stamp pattern tool. Anyway, hold the alt key and let’s click on her eye. Now let go of the alt key and let’s make a new document with 400x100.

Now let’s be happy and brush way. And make sure you brush all the way. If you do another action, like use the move tool, and go back to the clone stamp, the tool won’t pick up where you left off. It’ll start to make another clone of the pic. Notice that there, is a plus looking sign on the original and a circle on the one we’re working on.


That cross is telling you what’s going to be cloned based on where you place your cursor. Take note of this if you’re going use this tool on the same workspace. Or when you’re doing something like this pic here of my friend that convinced him to do for a school project I’m doing.


the original:

I used the clone stamp tool here a lot. I was going to just cut and paste but the clone tool really helped me here.

And this is what I ended up with the brushing.


For now, we have to deal with removing the rest of the background but that’s shouldn’t take too long. I simply used my magic wand with a 10 tolerance to remove the background. if you have a pic with a complex background, try using a combination of the select tools like the rectangle marquee with the quick mask tool.

And after some brush work and other stuffs.


Now as I said in the cons, you have to watch for the image size. This is probably no biggie since we do have to resize our renders anyway. But then again, we can still have a pretty big render but do a framing, which is we use the canvas to frame a specific part of the render. Like we have here with this old sig I made.

I didn’t use the whole render, but used a specific part of the render. With the clone stamp tool, you won’t have that luxury so take note as to where you want to start off the clone stamp tool.


that about wraps it up for some of ways to do it. there some tools that can do it quickly will others can take time.