Playing with some of the new tools.......
This is my precious Cooney who has lived under my back porch over a year. He and Bebè seem to rub along very well. He was the runt of a litter...smaller and scrawny compared to his siblings. I shouldn't, but I feed him. When I shot this, he was looking in the porch window waiting for his supper.
Hold the mouse on his picture and you will see how I was able to Select him with the new Refine Edge Tool and put him on another background.
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Here we have Timmy asleep in his chair with his toy white cat that looks just like him.
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I used the old Extract Tool to put him on a black background. |
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Here I used the new Refine Edge Tool. I don't think it is as easy to use as the Extract Tool, but I am finding it does an amazing job of selecting hair. |
Working with Julie
| This is Julie McComsey, Mark's lovely wife. I shot this back in May when I was in California. As you can see she has very curly hair which makes it very difficult to Select her and put her on new backgrounds. Here are some different attempts using the new Refine Edge tool. |  |
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This isn't too bad, but the Refine brush didn't pick up the right side of her head very well. |
This attempt is pretty good.
This one is the best, I think. I also straightened her out with the new Puppet Warp Tool...it distorts less than the Liquify Tool. Also the background color may have made the Refine Edge work better in picking out the hair wisps.
Julie designs fantastic jewelry.
Visit her website!
More Timmy
With this new Quick Selection Tool, it is so easy to make a rough selection of him and paint in his edges with the Refine Edge Brush...probably because his white fur is such a contrast to any background.
Click on this picture and you will see what I did to him in another window.
I added him to a new background made from the pink pillow, opened his eyes a bit with the Liquify tool, gave him "eyeliner" with the Burn Tool and added a shadow.
The new Content-Aware features for cleaning things up
This is a picture I took in May when Missy and I were heading to her house in Montrose.
We were on the Glendale 2.
It is hard to believe that this is the same photograph. It was a bit over exposed, so I mainly edited the color stuff in Camera Raw. Then by making rough selections of the stuff I didn't want, and filling them with Content-Aware, it was a miracle. Then I cleaned it up with the Clone Tool, using the content-aware feature. Unbelievable! By the way, you can see why I still love the Crescenta Valley. If you have to live in So. Calif., it is an exquisite area!
Here's another one I took from Foothill Blvd.
Click on the picture to open a new window. All's I did was use the Spot Healing Brush set to Content-Aware and painted over the wires and pole.
More Refine Edge Stuff
I did this a few years ago. I love to use it in cards and stick spiders in it to scare Missy. It is tricky to Select just the web....usually you make a Threshold adjustment layer and that turns it it into black and white. Then you clean it up on a layer mask.
Here I used the Lasso Tool around the web, and then the Refine Edge brush. It did pretty well, but I still had to lower the opacity of the mask to see the original, and paint back more web strands. Still, it's amazing!
Here's another Cooney Selection.
This is Maureen's precious Al Kitty. I think this is my best effort to date with the Refine Edge Tool, although I could go back and get more of the fine hairs at the top of her head.
Click on the picture to see the result.