Extract Components Tutorial.

To use this tutorial, you must have a basic knowledge of Photoshop and its tools.

In this tutorial I will try to show you how I extract people or items from pictures to use them in collages. Most of it I teached myself while doing fantasy art, you always need a lot of different elements to create a fantasy scene.  I´m sure you will be disapointed in this one because I´m doign nothing special at all. Ok, lets get started. :)

Step 1: What I do first is to make a copy of the image I want to use. I never work on the original one. Open your image, select everything with the Rectangular Marquee Tool (Feather 0 px, Style: normal) copy it, create a new file and paste the copied picture into it. For my tut I will extract Mal (the one in the middle) from this picture.

Step 2: Choose the Polygonal Lasso Tool from your tool bar. (Feather 0px, Anti-Aliased) Now make a rough selection of Mal. You can now either copy or cut out the selection. Make a new file (white background) and paste the selection  into the new layer. 1, 2

Step 3: Now comes the part that will take some time if you want it to look good. Zoom in very close to any part of the picture, I´ll start with his right shoulder. You should see the pixels pretty good by now. Next, we choose  the Polygonal Lasso Tool again  from the tool bar, same settings as before, and start to select along the outer line of Mal. When you have done that just hit the delete button. 1, 2, 3

Step 4: All you have to do now is repeat that step along the whole body, Like I said it takes some time if you want it to look good. 1

Step 5: After we have removed everything, zoom back to the original size. Now you might see some edges that don´t look as smooth as they should. 1

Step 6: With the eraser from the tool bar choose a hard round brush, I usually work with the size 3-9 px. Just try and see what´s best for you. Now we zoom in on the parts we want to corect. Work slow and gentle along the edges you want to smooth up. Now we have a pretty cut out Mal we can put on any background we want. :) 1, 2, 3

There sure are better ways to do this but it works for me.

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