Selection of images with Extract

Extract is a built-in Adobe PhotoShop plug-in used for selecting images. You would not need to pay for it or install it, which is a good thing. At the same time Extract is not as rich in tools as most of third party plug-ins.

Interface and tools

Extract has a usual Adobe Plugin interface with the tools on the left, all options on the right and image in the center. There’s only one selecting tool – the Highlighter – for defining the edges of the object to be selected. The Fill in Bucket fills the outlined area (the line has to be closed) and there’s an Eraser for correction. You can choose the highlight and fill colors and change the Brush size. When using Force Foreground option the entire image should be covered with the Highlighter (the Fill is disabled) and one color can be chosen to be retained.

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The Adobe Extract Plugin can also work with textured images where you can define the degree of smoothness.
The interface is quite friendly and intuitive. Almost everything can be understood without entering Help, which is not over detailed either. And there’s always a tip line showing above the image explaining the use of the active tool.
The preview has options for the background: you can change colors, see the extracted image on a transparent background, or have a mask view. What you can’t do though, is to download your own texture or image to view the extracted image on.

Images with well-defined edges

{mosimage ch=100 align=left}Extracting images with well-defined edges is quick and easy in Extract as it is easy in other selection plugins. With the tulip photo I used smart highlight option (as recommended by help file), the size of the Highlighter head 30. I made the outline (in the smart highlight mode the highlighter defines and follows the edge keeping its middle on it) and filled the interior. After the Preview I had to additionally highlight a couple of places (you can probably see them on the picture). Then I had to restore some areas along  the stem edges as they were half transparent, and the job was complete. The pressing of OK sent the image back to Adobe PhotoShop where it could be cut out and pasted into new background. I found the selection perfect as it blends well with the new background: the edges are smooth and there is no any halo or traces of the original background.

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Complex images; hair

Complex images make the selection process much more difficult. Extract works with these images with the same Highlighter tool. The highlighter covers the area with hair and the program should differentiate hair colors from the background. Clearly the complexity of the background and the color difference would mean a lot here.

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In the image of a girl above the hair is black and the background is white. This makes the photo easy for extraction. I covered the loose hair areas and the earrings with thicker highlight. The first preview gave some transparency on the hand and wrist. So, second time I made the line as thin as possible working with the SmartHighlight option on body and clothes part and using Eraser on the hair part.
The final result was satisfying enough until you look at the picture closely. Then you’ll see partial transparency in the fringe. {mosimage cw=80 align=right}This can be partially corrected by touchup tools. But, as I discovered, the Edge tool tends to add transparency where you have half transparent thin lines like loose hair or earrings in this case. (By the way, when using the Zoom button for close view I discovered that you couldn’t use this button or right click the mouse to zoom out. Only Ctrl- combination works that is a usual Photoshop combination. But who remembers those combinations? I wouldn’t mind a tip on this shown to me in the tip line.)

When the image is more complex you can’t get even such result. In the picture below, the girl has two feathery tails of fair hair on a cluttered background containing very close colors. The tails ends are highlighted. The resulted extraction can be acceptable on a dark background but the light one gives away all the deficiencies of the selection, that is the remains of the background. If this can be mended by Edgetool or Cleanup tool that would probably consume a lot of time. The selection took very little time though.

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In the third picture the model has the hair very close in color to the background. This situation has to theoretically be handled by the TexturedImage option. So I tried the option on the image, first with Smooth on zero then raising it higher up to the 100. The result was poor every time though.
The touch up tools only gave smooth hairline but all loose hair was lost completely and the extraction itself looked artificial and not fit for most backgrounds.

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Animals’ fur poses a very similar task: it is a problem to retain all that fuzziness. The image I tested here brings in additional problems: the baby manul in it is taken within the cage and the background cage and the animal fur contain similar colors. What is more the left part of the image is not sharp.

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The resulted selection is not bad though it is not ideal. The whiskers look untidy. The head fur and the ear are too smooth, and the fur on the back looks bitten.
The outline and fill you see on the right were the 3d try. I tried my best to make the inside highlight very thin and to use as narrow a highlighter head as possible to outline the whiskers of the animal.

And again – where the background and the foreground colors stand wide and the image is sharp Extract works very well. Even with something very close to hair. In my case it was a leafless tree standing against the background of the evening sky.

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All I did here – is to cover the tree and separate grass stems with the highlighter and filled the rest with the fill bucket. The result is good: you can see all the branches and little twigs although they may be a little too transparent to the ends.

Transparent objects

It seems Extract cannot deal with transparent objects. It should be mentioned though that it doesn’t even pretend it can: there’s nothing about it in the help file at least. The closest I could get to transparency was the image of some green leaves on a white background. Some of the leaves are half transparent and show light through them. When selecting those leaves I used the Force Foreground option.

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Using it you select a color to be retained and cover the area you want to retain entirely with the highlighter. After the third attempt I managed to find the color, which gave desired degree of transparency in the lighter parts and retained the darker parts as well. Even then some touch up work was required to bring back the areas that were considered too dark and not taken by the program
This example shows well why it is almost impossible to extract transparent images in this plugin: the color you can choose to be retained is only one. For most transparent objects you’ll need at least three of them: light, dark and midtone.
To sum it up, Extract is good for sharp images with clearly detectable edges and contrasting colors. It can work with hair but tends to make loose strands too transparent. There are some types of transparent or rather semitransparent objects that would be handled well by Extract but they are quite few. All in all Extract should be suitable if you need to cut out numerous images with high speed and not very high quality.

Look also at the comparison of selecting tools and selection results and at the rating of the plug-ins.

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