Hello all; I was wondering if someone caould tell me if its possable to remove the background from this picture so that just the tree branches forming the face are all thats left? Also once thats done can I change the color of the branches to gold or any other color? Thanks much Steel

I would suggest using the Select > Color Range feature and select the blues and whites of the sky--or the reddish brownish colors of the "branches", whichever you prefer--to isolate it. For changing colors, I'd use Adjust Hue/Saturation or Color Balance.

Do you want to remove 100% of the background?... If so, the simplest method, in view of the colours involved, would be to use the "magic eraser" very tightly controlled, but with "contiguous" unchecked... for safety's sake, make a copy of the layer, then "hide" it.. click visible OFF in layers. probably set tolerance to about 50%, and do the blue first... when you do the white, make SURE there isn't any red tint where you click.... either that, or reset tolerance to about 5%... . One thing you might do, I find this helps me out, is to create a new layer... fill colour set at white, and move it "below" the layer you're working on.. otherwise, it gets hard to see. to change the colour of the "branches", you can use "replace colour" Lou.

I prefer the quick mask in situations like this. Press Q to enter the quick mask mode and use the brush to paint the isolated areas. Press D to set default black and white colors, if you want to select the face paint with black over it, if you want to select suronding background paint with black over the background. Use slightly soft brush, this way you have interactive control over the selection. Try it its very easy and cool way

Here is example of quick results using quick mask ;)

this was 1 shot with magic eraser set at 75%, contiguous unclicked, antialias clicked on, then "painted" with Replace colour. and a touch of lens filter. Lou

another option is the extract Command, ( Alt/Option + Ctrl/Command + X ) use the Highlighter to trace the image, use the Eraser to remove any markings you dont want, when finished with the outline use the paint bucket to fill it in than pick on the preview, than if you need to (C) use the Clean up tool or the (T) Touch up tool, than pick OK. good luck and have fun...=]

Background extraction can be done using several techniques some more straightforward than others, magic wand, magic eraser, extraction filter and color range. When colors are very close to each other in the digital spectrum the procedure can become very labor intensive and it all boils down to how badly you want to extract an image from its background. In your image it becomes immediately apparent that the background is lighter than the foreground image you want to extract. An easy way of determining this if it isnt at first obvious, is to squint your eyes and see where the shadows and lights aggregate in the perceived image. If the image is too dark and the perceived image is one big mass of darkness (or the image may be too light) then you know youre in for a very long night of extraction (sometimes it takes days). The most labor intensive way and the most accurate is using the pen tool to carefully outline that part of the image you want to extract under zoom magnification. Using this approach you have the option of fine-tuning your selection since the individual vertices created by the pen tool can be moved and place precisely where you need them. This comes in very handy when correcting selection mistakes because you can even add or subtract vertices as you need them. Finely you can convert your pen tool path into a selection in the Path palette and then save your selection either to disk or to the channels palette. But heres another way of extracting an image from its background when the lights and the shadows are apparent. Make two layer copies of your image and hide the bottom most (your original). You now have the two copies to work with. Highlight the uppermost copy and from the Filter menu select Others->High Pass. Set the high pass filter to 4.8 radius pixels. Make this layer mode an overlay and merge down to the first layer copy of your image (Ctrl+E). Doing this will make your dark edges more distinct and contrasty. Now in the Image menu select Adjustments->Threshold and for this image you can leave it at the default 128 but you will note that sliding the up arrow under the histogram alters your whites and blacks selections. This will separate your lights from the shadows leaving the background in white and your foreground image in black. Looking at this layer in black and white we realize that this layer can now be used as an alpha channel to extract our foreground from our background. But in order to do this properly we need to reverse the image so that the foreground image becomes white and the background becomes black. Apply Ctrl+I and your layer colors reverse. Making sure that your threshold layer is the only layer selected click into the channels palette and grab the red channel and drag it down to the create new channel icon next to the trash can icon at the bottom of the panel. You now have an alpha channel that will select your foreground image. Holding the Ctrl key while clicking this alpha channel will automatically select the foreground image in your layers palette.

Further, since you still have the threshold layer sitting in your layers palette we can select the image from that B&W layer and extract the black image leaving it by itself with a transparent background (hit Ctrl+J to do so). Ctrl+U will bring up your Hue/Saturation dialog and clicking on colorize we can now alter the color. First set the lightness to something like +10 so that you can see the changes while sliding the hue and saturation sliders.

Very cool, Quest. Another 'advanced' technique... look at the channels and choose the two with the most contrast. in this image's case it was the green and the blue (red had the least). Now, choose Image>Calculations and set it up as shown in the attached. This will create a new channel w/ the emphasized difference, then you can use this as the mask as Quest did. This will get much finer details if you continue using levels or contrast to increase the contrast in your mask alphas and multiply them together. It takes practice and experimentation, but you can mask hairs w/ this technique and isolate complicated details.

I was playing a little trying to find quick and easy way to remove that background. Here are the results. 1. Duplicate the background layer 2. Use filter - high pass with this settings 5,6% 3. Set the layer blend mode to linear dodge and all the backgound will became pure white 4. Flatten the layers 5. Use select - color range and click with eye droper on the left upper corner of the image to select all white areas, drag the slider to 0% 6. Press CTRL+SHIFT+I to inverse the selection and press CTRL+J to place the selection on his own layer. 7. Finally add Hue/Saturation adjustment layer from drop down menu next to the new layer icon in layers palette. Check the colorize box and insert this settings for gold 43, 70, -54.

There is much more text than actual work in here. You can use this for any kind of background removal :)

Tihomir
 

I was playing a little trying to find quick and easy way to remove that background. Here are the results. 1. Duplicate the background layer 2. Use filter - high pass with this settings 5,6% 3. Set the layer blend mode to linear dodge and all the backgound will became pure white 4. Flatten the layers 5. Use select - color range and click with eye droper on the left upper corner of the image to select all white areas, drag the slider to 0% 6. Press CTRL+SHIFT+I to inverse the selection and press CTRL+J to place the selection on his own layer. 7. Finally add Hue/Saturation adjustment layer from drop down menu next to the new layer icon in layers palette. Check the colorize box and insert this settings for gold 43, 70, -54.

There is much more text than actual work in here. You can use this for any kind of background removal :)

Tihomir
 

I was playing a little trying to find quick and easy way to remove that background. Here are the results. 1. Duplicate the background layer 2. Use filter - high pass with this settings 5,6% 3. Set the layer blend mode to linear dodge and all the backgound will became pure white 4. Flatten the layers 5. Use select - color range and click with eye droper on the left upper corner of the image to select all white areas, drag the slider to 0% 6. Press CTRL+SHIFT+I to inverse the selection and press CTRL+J to place the selection on his own layer. 7. Finally add Hue/Saturation adjustment layer from drop down menu next to the new layer icon in layers palette. Check the colorize box and insert this settings for gold 43, 70, -54.

There is much more text than actual work in here. You can use this for any kind of background removal :)

Tihomir
 

I was playing a little trying to find quick and easy way to remove that background. Here are the results. 1. Duplicate the background layer 2. Use filter - high pass with this settings 5,6% 3. Set the layer blend mode to linear dodge and all the backgound will became pure white 4. Flatten the layers 5. Use select - color range and click with eye droper on the left upper corner of the image to select all white areas, drag the slider to 0% 6. Press CTRL+SHIFT+I to inverse the selection and press CTRL+J to place the selection on his own layer. 7. Finally add Hue/Saturation adjustment layer from drop down menu next to the new layer icon in layers palette. Check the colorize box and insert this settings for gold 43, 70, -54.

There is much more text than actual work in here. You can use this for any kind of background removal :)

Tihomir
 

I was playing a little trying to find quick and easy way to remove that background. Here are the results.

1. Duplica

I was playing a little trying to find quick and easy way to remove that background. Here are the results. 1. Duplicate the background layer 2. Use filter - high pass with this settings 5,6% 3. Set the layer blend mode to linear dodge and all the backgound will became pure white 4. Flatten the layers 5. Use select - color range and click with eye droper on the left upper corner of the image to select all white areas, drag the slider to 0% 6. Press CTRL+SHIFT+I to inverse the selection and press CTRL+J to place the selection on his own layer. 7. Finally add Hue/Saturation adjustment layer from drop down menu next to the new layer icon in layers palette. Check the colorize box and insert this settings for gold 43, 70, -54.

There is much more text than actual work in here. You can use this for any kind of background removal :)

Tihomir