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Remove Background from Photos - Difficult 10/10


adrianomm

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[FONT=arial, sans-serif]Hi, please could someone help me ? I watch a lot of videos about remove background but is easy when you have a gray background or the a blue sky and a green tree to remove . But in my work I need to remove background all day from images like this below. Studio photos with a white background and the person wearing white. [/FONT]
http://s13.postimg.org/cyeestutz/7128_002.jpg
At this moment I need to use the "Pen Tool" to draw around the body and make a perfect selection to erase background. This take a lot of time and I need to make more fast and with profissional final quality.
I tried a lot of tutorial , a lot of Plugin ( Topz Remask, Fluid Mask, Perfect Photo and others) and nothing work.

None of tutorial I can find a solution to remove the background to this kind of photos.
Please , could someone make a video tutorial or teach me here the best way to remove the background from this kind of photo ?

Thanks a lot

Adriano
 

Tom Mann

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As you already know, the pen tool is the best way to do this, but if you want to get close quickly, and then only have to use the pen tool to touch up just the problem areas, not everything, here's what I would do:

Run the image through the high pass filter. I used a radius of about 15 px. If you look at the histogram of the resulting image, it will have a single, relatively narrow peak centered around 50% gray. Apply a levels adjustment layer to this, bringing in the two endpoints (on the line immediately below the histogram) to the point where the histogram has crept up to about a quarter of its peak value. The resulting image should look somewhat like this:

7128_002-tjm01-acr-ps01a-00_HPF_plus_Lvls_to_develop_selection.jpg

Now, run the quick selection tool set to "add" around the outside of the subject, and then, one more time, xcept, set to "subtract", run it around just inside the periphery of the subject.

Use the resulting selection on the original (ie, non-high pass filtered) version of the image to get a preliminary view of the cutout against some other color background. I tweaked the selection a bit using "refine edges" to come up with what you see below. The total time I expended to get to this point was about 2 or 3 minutes.

7128_002-tjm01-acr-ps01a-01.jpg

If the slight bright halo around her hair, or the lumpy bulges of fabric on the subject's clothing are not satisfactory, tweak the selection using the pen tool, or even the brush tool. The advantage of working this way is that you'll be starting with a very good first approximation to a good selection, and probably only have to tweak a few areas, not start from scratch and run a path around everything.

HTH,

Tom M

PS - BTW, why isn't the photographer being more helpful and supplying images with either a brighter (completely blown out) or slightly darker background, either of which would make it your job a lot easier.
 

adrianomm

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Thank you so much !!!! This make my job much more easy!!!! Your are the best.

I just think you wrote wrong about 15px of High Pass filter. I got the same look of your image with 50px. Just a detail :)

PS - BTW, why isn't the photographer being more helpful and supplying images with either a brighter (completely blown out) or slightly darker background, either of which would make it your job a lot easier.

You are right, if the photographer use 50% gray background will be the heaven . But I need to remove just one background from 500 photos of one person and the others photos must have white background and some cases black background. Is more easy to remove one from 500 then replace 499 gray background to white or black. But black background is other nightmare for me when they use black cloths and the person have black hair.
We work here with college graduate albums and some cases the studio photos must have white or black balckground. This is not a photographer decision.

Today I need to remove about 150 more photos like this one. And I am about to cry because I take a look in the next contract and they don't have studio photos and I need to remove the background to create the album box case of 200 person like this two below. I will quit this job lol.

7167_009.jpg

7167_018.jpg


Tom , I am very sorry to bother you but if you have some tip for this background I will be very grateful

Thanks again

Adriano
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Tom Mann

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Hi Adriano - I'm glad that my previous suggestion was of some help. BTW, you probably are right about the radius being 50, not 15 pixels -- I was half asleep when I wrote that up and probably forgot exactly what setting I used. I'm glad to see that you tweaked it yourself to get the best effect.

With respect to the two images that you just posted, the general idea is always that in order to use automated selection tools like the quick selection tool to speed up the cut-out process, the color and tonal differences between the subject and the background must be absolutely clear by eye before such tools have any chance of working well.

So, in the case of these two photos, the problem is distinguishing the dark tones of the clothing from the very similar dark tones of the background. Basically, you need to substantially brighten these dark areas while preserving contrast between adjacent dark tones. There are several ways one can do this, but a quick, all-in-one solution is to bring the images into Photoshop via ACR. I used the following settings in the "Basic" and in the "Detail" tabs of ACR.

ACR-basic_settings.jpg


ACR-detail_settings.jpg

Note that I used quite a bit of luminosity and color noise reduction. This is almost always necessary when one is brightening up very dark tones. If you don't do this, you often wind up with some very strange artifacts (eg, blocks if the source image is a JPG, posterization if the source image is only 8 bpc, good old-fashioned noise, as well as every combination of the above, LOL)

The attached images show the results of this pre-processing in ACR. So, just like in your first example, automated selection tools now at least have a chance of working and quickly giving you a good starting point for further refinement using the pen, brush, or other manual selection tools.

HTH,

Tom M
 

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