Hey Joan!

[sangwitch]

Pepere, I'm not sure I follow your last sentence. I use PhotoShop and I also have Paint Shop Pro.
My apologies if you already know this:
A quick and easy (and very effective) way of cutting an object in Paint Shop Pro is by using the lasso tool. In the tool options set the selction type to 'Smart Edge', 'Feather=0', Uncheck 'Antialias' and 'Sample merged' boxes. Then you click somewhere on the edge of your object to start and then continue to click on the edge of your object in small distance increments until you're all the way around. Once you reach the starting point, double click to complete the selection. The Smart Edge will find your edges as you go. Play with this to get the feel for it. (The lasso defaults to freehand, which is practically useless in my eyes unless you want to do a quick cut and don't care about getting some background in there. For simple, one color backgrounds the magic wand works great. )


The edges will be a little jagged from not feathering and from turning antialias off. This is ok because once you move the object to the new background you do your feathering and blending then.


paste your object on the new background then go to
Selections->Modify->Feather
pick a pixel value (usally 1or2 works best depending on your object's edges). And you're done. Of course, play around with Antialias and feather as you cut your object and see what works best for the situation. I also find the blur effect to help in setting an object onto a new background.


BTW - I sometimes have to put documentation together with screen shots from the computer and there's nothing better than microsoft Paint for that. For certain jobs there's no better tool.

 

[Pepere]

Sang, I guess I don't use the program enough. I usually try using the magic wand and I guess that's where I have problems. If I tried to use the wand on the girl figure on my bottle it would have cut her in half because of the white belt, hence I end up using the erase tool and zoom in so I can see the individual pix.


I have, since reading your post tried yourmethod and it does work. You can still clean up edges with the erase tool and get it near perfect. Those advanced techniques using blur and feather are great as well. Thanks.

 

[sangwitch]

my pleasure. For a long time I was zooming in on an object and then cutting section by section using the lasso in freehand mode, but then someone turned me on to the "smart edge" method. I'm learning Photoshop now and Joan is the photoshop expert round these here parts.

 

[NorthernWinos]

I need a program that can identify one object from another and can separate them. 

Wade....I have been attempting to cut out an object from a print...

BEFORE...

AFTER...

I used the PAINT Program....did as was suggested....under VIEW ....ZOOM.....CUSTOM...and zoomed it up to 600%...then used the FREE FORM SELECT and drew around the object...then saved it to my folder [that took some figuring]

I for sure need more practice...But got my crabapple image for my label...

 

[Wade E]

Looks very good NW. What happens when you put it on a dark background
though. Thats when when all the little missed areas stand out.

 

[Joanie]

One of the many beautiful things about Photoshop is there are several ways to extract an object from its background. If you then save the extracted object on a new transparent background, you don't have to worry about the parts you erase. You can then put the object into any other picture. You can also just copy and paste the extracted object directly into your project. It's slick I tell ya! =)