Digiscrapping.net - Tutorials

Extracting in PSP

This is an easy tutorial, it just takes patience, a steady hand, and lots of practice. Hopefully with the tutorial, it won't take you as much practice as it took me when I was learning!

First, open up the image that you want to extract from. Zoom in on it and select your lasso tool. Set it point to point. For your settings, I always set my feather at 2.

Pick a starting point and start going around your item/person. You want to left click often as you are going around (or if you are using a pen like I am, press down often.) This will save the spot that you have done. Keep going around. In the example below, ignore the fact that a section is already selected. I had to do that so you could see the marching ants where I started. Just look at the right side of the selection to see how I started going around the car.

Continue all the around your item/person that you are extracting until you come back to your starting point.

Go to Selection, Invert

You can do this next step now, or you can do it when you first open your picture. Right click on the photo in your layers pallet and promote background layer. Just make sure that you promote it at some time before the next step or you will not get the transparency that we want with an extraction

Hit Delete on your keyboard

Over at your layers pallet, right click (or click on the drop down layers menu) and add new raster layer.

Use your fill tool and fill that layer with a contrasting color to your item/person you extracted. Then drag that layer below your extracted layer.

Now we're going to clean up the extraction. Even people who have been extracting for years have to clean up a little (I've been extracting for close to 3 years and I still have spots to fix.) Zoom in so that you can see what you are cleaning up close. Select a very small area.

Hit delete. Now, to unselect, you can either go up to selection, select none, but that gets tedious when you have a lot to select and deselect, so, you can also, just right click on your image. Your selection will disappear. Your going to want to move around your extraction and get all of those little areas that were left behind. If you have a SMALL amount of jaggedness, don't worry about it, we'll fix that later. Make sure you get rid of the big jagged areas and tall points.

Now, what do you do if you just can't get close enough to get rid of an area. That's easy! Get as close as you can.

Then go to selections, modify, expand -

Expand that selection by 1 (2 if you are a little farther away, but I wouldn't do much more than that or your going to create more jaggeds.)

Then hit delete, and deselect that area.

Now, I am anal when it comes to getting rid of little points.

Just start a line in an area near it and barely brush the edge of the point, then come up around in a circle to finish the selection. Delete and deselect.

You might not be able to tell the difference here, but I can and you will to when it's zoomed up close to you.

When you get done, you should have something like this.

Now, we're going to get rid of any uneveness that may have come with the lasso tool. (little little jaggies that might be hard to get rid of.

You can either select everything by going to select, select all, float, defloat. Or use the keyboard shortcuts. CTRL + A, CTRL + F, CTRL + A + F. Now, invert that selection.
(Select, invert OR CTRL + SHIFT + I)
Now, go to select, modify, expand selection, I would expand this by 1 or 2. No more or your going to get an extraction that looks like it has a blur around the edges.

Go to Adjust, blur, gaussian blur and set that to 1 or 2.

Go to your layers pallet and delete the fill layer (the bottom layer). Now, you can save the image (make sure you save it as a PSP Image or a PNG file, that will keep your transparency.) OR, copy and paste it directly onto your layout.

That's it. See, lots of steps, but it's really not that hard. Just a matter of practicing, working on your hand being steady, and don't forget to breathe. I've asked a lot of people who extract, and most of us seem to hold our breath while we are doing it. LOL

I hope this tutorial helped you!

Now that I'm looking at it, I should have extracted a little more on the right side, but you get the picture! :o)