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Selecting Feathered/Barely Visible Regions with Magic Wand


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ArgoshKobash

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Hey everyone, I'm having a problem using the Magic Wand.

I want to select only the monkey in the image above, but instead of following its contours exactly, magic wand selects regions that are barely visible/feathered. I hope you can see the image well enough, I don't know how to adjust the size and the forum does not permit me to post a link because I have fewer than 5 posts.

Adjusting the tolerance and the contiguous setting do not help, and because I have hundreds of these images with the associated problem, manually erasing those barely visible regions is not an option.

Is there any way I can solve this problem in an automatic fashion?

Thanks!
 
Your psd is not helpful. There is nothing on it but a layer mask which neither conceals or reveals anything. ???

Where is the original image? By the way, you are going to have difficulty with these because they are such poor quality. Do you have any larger images to work with?
 
Thank you for your reply ibclare. I'm sorry that the psd was not helpful. The layer mask was leftover from me trying out different things. Like you said it is not necessary.

The original image has foliage and background that I wanted to remove. The .psd in it's current state is the result of using the magnetic lasso and eraser to isolate the monkey against a transparent background.

I know that the photo is of poor quality but it's all that I have and the final image will be sized smaller than this so it won't look as bad.

Do you know how I could select only the monkey and not anything else?

Thanks.
 
Do you have the original with all the background in it? We can show you a better way to select the animal. Whatever you use, you will probably have to refine the edge, for which there is a tool under select. You will probably also have to zoom in and check the edges for gross errors before using the refine edge window.
 
I do not have access to the original at this time, but I have attached a similar original photo. Please do not repost this image.

My process for selecting an animal such as this one was to use the magnetic lasso to trace the edge of the animal, and then refine the edge with smoothing and feather. I then copied this selection to a new document and removed any errors with the eraser or with the magnetic lasso>refine edge.

I appreciate you offering to show me a better way to select the animal. This would be very helpful for future photos, but I don't have the time to go back and re-select animals that I have already selected (hundreds of images) in order to avoid the original problem that I stated in my first post. Do you know of a way to solve this problem?

Thanks.
 

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Well, for one thing, if you use the levels, curve, or contrast adjustments, you get better edges. That should help. But I do wish you had to come to us for suggestions before you did all that work. We could have led you to the pen tool which is a far better tool for this job. Even the quick select (underneath the magic wand) is a much better tool than the wand and I like it better for initial selection than the lasso if I'm not going to use the pen tool. You can always then add a slight feather or otherwise soften the edges since animals have fur. Well, try one of the methods I mentioned. Someone else may have ideas for you.
 
Here's something else to try.

Go back into your mask. Select a round brush, black, at about half hardness, maybe harder. Use various opacities, start with low around 30 or 40 and where you have rougher edges up it to 70-100%. Go around your really smooth edges like the toes with a hard round brush and experiment with opacities. That is the best way I can think of to refine your edge further. Smoothing and feathering will only give you more translucent pixels like you want to get rid of.
 
my advice. if all fails just use pen tool. image in not complicated so pen tool will do the job perfectly. don't use magnetic lasso - you just giving your control over the selection away and that's not what you want. pen tool is perfect for that type of images. time consuming but if you get use to it its very..autopilot. then refine edge a little bit and you good to go
 
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