Clare's understanding, approach and end result is absolutely masterful, but, FWIW, sometimes money *can* buy you love. :mrgreen:
The attached animation shows the result of spending about 1 fairly mindless minute in Topaz ReMask. I didn't do any touch-up work on the output of ReMask.
In the interest of full disclosure:
a) I applied ReMask to a higher contrast, more saturated version of the original to make ReMask's job easier. I then used that mask on the actual image. This set-up step probably added another 30 seconds.
b) It probably took me another minute or so to set up the animation, and probably 5 minutes to write up this description.
The areas circled in red in the 3rd frame of my GIF animation shows the errors in my extraction that I spotted. I could have easily touched them up, but for the purpose of a comparison between essentially a fully automated extraction and a heavily manual extraction, I didn't retouch these areas.
The two errors along the bottom edge of the frame and the uppermost error (the big white area between feathers) were completely due to my inattention when I was painting in the "keep", "cut", and "transition" areas in ReMask.
However, I would consider the whispy leftmost error, and the green background bleedthrough at the ends of her hair to be shortcomings of ReMask.
Anyway, thought ya'll might find this comparison interesting, especially if you ever are in a situation where you have to crank out a bunch of cutouts in a limited amount of time.
T
