Trying to remove dark background from curly hair!

[Kinsjey]

Hello!

I'm very new to photoshop and I'm trying to make a birthday card. To do this I need to cut a girl out from a background. Yesterday I played around with paths, but its very hard to get a good result. Today I've been trying other methods with limited success. I've been watching tutorials and seem to be making some progress, but not quite there!

Here is what I've done.

1. Open a file in photoshop.
2. Duplicate the layer.
3. Go to layer style.
4. Drag the 'this layer' bar at the bottom right down. I saw this done in a tutorial to remove hair from a background and it seems to remove bright areas. In the tutorial the background was white so this left the image mostly intact. However in my image the background is dark so this leaves the image gone and the background in tact.

This leaves me with a silhouette with the curls of the hair present. What I want to do is select everything that isn't now just blank and turn that into a layer mask that I can put over the original picture. That will leave me with the picture without the background.

Here's where I'm running into difficulty. Its probably really easy, but I just can't work out how to do it. Magic wand doesn't because the selection is not perfect.

Does any of that make sense? Sorry I've been confusing myself!

Is this a good way of doing this or are there better ways? Every tutorial I've seen involves bright backgrounds. Unfortunately the image I have is the only one I can use...

Any help much appreciated!

[Steve]

"Its probably really easy, but I just can't work out how to do it."

Hi Kinsjey and welcome to PSG.
Actually it's one of the most difficult things to do.
See if this video helps you.

PS CS5 - Advanced Channel Masking Technique [1080p]

This is in done in CS5 but 95% of this applies to earlier versions.