Photoshop question

I work a lot in Photoshop (CS2). The one thing I have major problems with is changing a background (good snake picture with bad lighting and a grey background) or cutting just the snake out of the picture. I hear that there are filters to be able to do this but I haven't found them. Any suggestions that don't involve the lasso tool? :)

I paint in a masking layer to select the background then just fill it with white or a gradient

The art of selection/masking is like chess...takes a few minutes to learn and a lifetime to master...keep working at it, grasshopper (we all suck at it).

I place all my photos in Illustrator, zoom in and use the pen tool to make a shape of the outline. Then I assign it a white fill and do a select all - Object menu - Make path. That drops everything outside the actual snake. Then you can export it as a tif, jpeg, or whatever and you can then do whatever you want to the white background in Photoshop. A snake photo usually takes under 5 minutes and looks about as smooth as you will get. PS has a pen tool, but it doesn't work as smoothly as the pen in AI. Snakes work especially easy with this.

Pen Tool........your best friend!

And I know your talking Photoshop, but this is a really helpful tutorial for Illustrator. And some of these techniques are easily applied to Photoshop

http://youtube.com/watch?v=5DzpT8POAME

Awesome stuff guys! I am going to test some out and post the results...

I'm waaaay too stupid to work the pen tool in illustrator. I can make lots of squigglys though.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Patrick Long

Pen Tool........your best friend!

And I know your talking Photoshop, but this is a really helpful tutorial for Illustrator. And some of these techniques are easily applied to Photoshop

http://youtube.com/watch?v=5DzpT8POAME

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Haha, that guy sucks. The pen tool is definitely your best friend though.

I posted this link up a little while back...It's a screen capture of me extracting a snake using the Pen tool. Yes, the Pen tool rocks :gj:

http://nathanledet.com/snakeextraction

u can also use Extract in the filters :P (should be above Liquify )

and then for the lil imperfections u can use the history brush to fix