Tom Mann
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The suggestions by Larry, Sam, Paul, etc. to use a brush to refine your mask are right on the mark, especially with fine structures like hair, as well as when the color and/or tonal contrast between the subject and the original background are small. I'm sure you will get the hang of this soon.
To get to the point where you only need to refine a small number of edge pixels with the brush technique, one can make an initial selection using any of several selection tools including the pen tool (a favorite of many), the "Quick selection" tool (which I often start with), and you can then try to refine the initial selection from any of these tools using the "Refine Edge" tool. Sometimes "Refine Edge" works well, sometimes it's not that great, as you have discovered.
However, there is one trick that really helps out both the "Quick Selection" and the "Refine Edge" tools, and that is to make a temporary image that has greatly exaggerated local tonal contrasts, as well as greatly exaggerated color contrasts, and then use the Quick Selection and Refine Edges tools on that temporary image to quickly construct a reasonably good initial selection for your real image. I find this approach is often much faster and gives one a much more accurate starting point for the final tweaks of the selection with a brush than some of the other methods.
One can increase local tonal contrast by using tools such as medium radius Unsharp Masking or third party tools such as Topaz's "Detail", NIK's "Tonal Contrast" in their Color Efx Pro package, or many other methods. One can increase the color contrast (ie, contrasts in both saturation AND in hue) by increasing the vibrance, and by temporarily converting the image to the LAB color space and then pulling in the endpoints on the "a" and "b" channels. These are the approaches I took in the example below, and then only needed to touch up a few fly-away hairs with a brush at the end of the process. To show what parts of my initial selection looked like before any touch up work with a brush (ie, with only Quick Select and Refine Edges), I intentionally did not do any brush work on a few of loops of hair in the (viewer's) upper right hand corner of the subject's head.
One final comment -- it is rare to be able to use the exact same cutout on a black background as well as a white background. Almost always, the mask needs to be adjusted slightly depending on the brightness of the background. Complex, textured backgrounds are the easiest to drop in. Almost anything will work with them, but solid, very dark or very light final backgrounds will test anyone's skill.
I start off the sequence of attached images with the temporary version with the exaggerated local contrast and colors that I used only to quickly (ie, 3 or 4 minutes) construct a reasonably good initial selection. Starting with this approach, I then needed only another couple of minutes of painting to bring the selections to this point that you see. More time with the brush would have resulted in much more realistic edges.
HTH,
Tom M
To get to the point where you only need to refine a small number of edge pixels with the brush technique, one can make an initial selection using any of several selection tools including the pen tool (a favorite of many), the "Quick selection" tool (which I often start with), and you can then try to refine the initial selection from any of these tools using the "Refine Edge" tool. Sometimes "Refine Edge" works well, sometimes it's not that great, as you have discovered.
However, there is one trick that really helps out both the "Quick Selection" and the "Refine Edge" tools, and that is to make a temporary image that has greatly exaggerated local tonal contrasts, as well as greatly exaggerated color contrasts, and then use the Quick Selection and Refine Edges tools on that temporary image to quickly construct a reasonably good initial selection for your real image. I find this approach is often much faster and gives one a much more accurate starting point for the final tweaks of the selection with a brush than some of the other methods.
One can increase local tonal contrast by using tools such as medium radius Unsharp Masking or third party tools such as Topaz's "Detail", NIK's "Tonal Contrast" in their Color Efx Pro package, or many other methods. One can increase the color contrast (ie, contrasts in both saturation AND in hue) by increasing the vibrance, and by temporarily converting the image to the LAB color space and then pulling in the endpoints on the "a" and "b" channels. These are the approaches I took in the example below, and then only needed to touch up a few fly-away hairs with a brush at the end of the process. To show what parts of my initial selection looked like before any touch up work with a brush (ie, with only Quick Select and Refine Edges), I intentionally did not do any brush work on a few of loops of hair in the (viewer's) upper right hand corner of the subject's head.
One final comment -- it is rare to be able to use the exact same cutout on a black background as well as a white background. Almost always, the mask needs to be adjusted slightly depending on the brightness of the background. Complex, textured backgrounds are the easiest to drop in. Almost anything will work with them, but solid, very dark or very light final backgrounds will test anyone's skill.
I start off the sequence of attached images with the temporary version with the exaggerated local contrast and colors that I used only to quickly (ie, 3 or 4 minutes) construct a reasonably good initial selection. Starting with this approach, I then needed only another couple of minutes of painting to bring the selections to this point that you see. More time with the brush would have resulted in much more realistic edges.
HTH,
Tom M
