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(Page 2 of 3) Different types of imagesKnockOut works best of all, of course, with contrasted images, where the edges are smooth and the foreground color is bright. To make a first try I took a picture of the rose.
With it, I used Inside and Outside Object tools only. First, I draw the line in a polygonal mode with the picture fit in view. Then I improved the line by adding to the selections. Afterwards I worked with the Brush and the Eraser on the knocked out image. The selection you can see on the left was made at the 3rd level of detail (set by default). When the level of detail was 4 (on the right) the touchup tools were hardly needed.
Another way to make things simpler is to make the contrast higher (by 20-30). Having made a mask on a high contrast image and at the 4th level of detail I got some very good results.
But when doing that you better create two layers and load selection to the one with the normal contrast. If you load it to the layer you worked with there will be problems with taking the contrast level back. As you see I pasted the selections onto different backgrounds. This can be helpful when checking the quality of the selections. Some flaws won’t be seen on a transparent background and will stand out on a colored one. That’s why I think it useful to play with the background colors when the selection is processed. You would probably want to choose the one which is close to the picture you want to paste your masked image into.
But such an object as this rose is simple enough and can be selected with the usual magnetic lasso imbedded in Photoshop to almost the same effect. KnockOut 2 was created for more challenging tasks obviously. Preserving hair Preserving hair is a hard and challenging job for any selecting program. You need to know the tools well and be ready to spend a lot of time on a picture. And it is high time to look into the manual or use the tutorial. Knock Out 2 has quite an adequate manual where you can find step by step instructions for selecting different types of images.
I make some presentations with animals to show to my children and wanted to put a picture of this baby manul into one of them. But I didn’t like the background (the cage) so masking was needed.
Masking animals is tricky as they have fur that gives a very uneven edge to the image.
This time Inside and Outside tools were not enough. I had to spend considerable time working out the inside selection, especially in the whiskers area, though.
The algorithm was the same: I made a rough selection, then magnified the picture and refined it.
I worked out the whickers under high magnification and with a very thin brush. It worked out fine enough. But you should be very precise with the mouse movements. I also used the Push Pin to add single pixels of the transition area to the selection. It was good for the separate whiskers. In the resulted mask there were some shreds around the whiskers. Even after I had worked with the Eraser and the Brush. So, when I applied the selection I used Blur on the edges and it made the picture not so ragged.
You can also use the Edge Feather Tool (lets you remove jagged edges from the processed foreground). It makes the edges not so ragged but the fur is lost anyway.
Still, around the whiskers of this animal Edge feather tool did not leave any shreds of the background like in the picture below.When I was working with the picture of baby manul I had to deal with singular whiskers. When it is human hair – await long tedious job. Only then you’ll have satisfactory results. Or not satisfactory (inside object tool in 100% magnification, touch up with 1 pixel restore brush). The bulk of the hair is seen in the masked image all right. But then the single strands go there’s some trouble. I first tried to solve the problem by working with the Brush (Touch UP) at the minimum thickness – 1px. But, as you see the result was not good. Those airy strands begun to look just like wire. My next attempt was to change the approach. This time I didn’t try to follow every hair but allowed the program to work on the transition area.As you see I tried to avoid passing the Inside tool through any areas where the background is showing through the girl's hair. The ouside line at the same time leaves off every strand of hair. (And only then I downloaded the Tutorial which told me I was right!)
The result of the first procession was fine but for the bits of almost transparent background.
To remove them I used the Pincers (Outside Image mode) and marked as Outside the single pixels of the background color I didn’t need (You can also use the feather and syringe tools and process the image again).
This procedure had to be repeted several times. And the result still was not satisfactory enough.
But at the third time I chose to try retouch tools (note: if you process the image again after the use of them all retouching will be lost).
So I removed the bits of the background with the erazer (where I could do it, for it is very difficult to eraze between the tangled strands of hair). And finally applied the image to return to Photoshop. There I loaded selection.
And here’s the final result, most of the details are in their place, several separate strands can be seen, although the ends look a bit gnawd.
By the way, I didn’t quite understand why the resulted selection looked differently in Photoshop than in Knock Out 2 itself. So I tried to apply the same selection to Corel PhotoPaint and the result was indeed different. It looks like Photoshop takes only fully opaque parts of the masked image into selection. Wheras PhotoPaint retaines halftransparent foreground colors of the transition area in the final selection. There are drawbacks to it, of course. In the sample fragment, for example, the traces of background can be seen. But they are half transparent and barely seen. The hair, at the same time, looks wonderful.
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