I use Mask Pro for this kind of work. "Lifting" is all based on color values. Your image has greens in the pixels you want to keep and pixels you want to dump. Still very doable.
Here is how I manage to do a lot of my cutouts. I use LR but it is adaptable to Photoshop, etc..
I convert a virtual copy of the image to B&W in LR using the Grayscale menu pick in the develop mode on the right side panel.
I use the cursor tool which is accessed by clicking the little dot in the upper left corner of the Grayscale panel. This converts your cursor to a tool where you put the cursor on the image, hold the left mouse button down and drag it up to make a tone lighter or back/down to make it darker.
The idea here is to get a high contrast B&W from subject to foreground. By tweaking the tone of the background to be dark and the subject to be light you start to get a separation in contrast. Get it pretty far but don't worry if it doesn't extremely black to extremely white.
Once you get it as far as you can open it up in Photoshop. Now select a soft edge brush and white as the paint color. Change the brush mode to overlay. Zoom into a boundary area of subject to background. Paint with white over the light area. Paint with black over the dark area.
What this does in overlay mode is if you paint with white in overlay on a totally black area it will not paint the white. Painting with white in overlay makes light areas lighter. You will have to go over it a few times to make it totally white. Alternate on border areas with painting with white and then white black switching frequently to slowly build up the contrast on either side of the border. The overlay mode makes it so you can be a little 'sloppy' in where you paint as painting in a dark area will not lighten it as much as painting in a light area. So by slowly building the dark and then the lights you get there pretty quick.
On 'fuzzy' areas like hair leave those areas somewhat gray and feathered. So don't paint too much or it will be too contrasty. Another thing you might have to play with is the opacity level of the brush, especially in these 'fuzzy' transition areas.
In the end you need to have a totally black and totally white image. The only gray-ish tones being in areas like hair, or otherwise 'fuzzy' areas. Make sure to zoom in and inspect areas to make sure they are totally black or white.
Here is an image example I started with recently...
....notice the tough areas transition nice and subtley
Now go into the channels palette (usually in the same area as the layers palette).
Select the blue channel (the channel color does not matter, I pick blue because it's on the bottom) and copy it.
Go back to the layer palette.
Now back in LR I open the original (instead of the virtual copy) into Photoshop.
In the selection menu in Photoshop pick "Load Selection" and pick the blue channel copy from the other image (It usually comes up as the default for me). This will make a selection from your B&W rendering. Next copy the background of the original color image. Then turn off the visibility of the original background layer. Now add a mask (little circle in a box icon on the layers palette). This should make your background invisible. If it makes the subject invisible instead do an undo and go to the selection menu and invert the selection then add the mask again, this will drop out the background.
It's not perfect and still needs a little touchup but it's a great starting point. The beauty here is that I can still 'tweak' the mask after I add it in a collage as long as I copy the mask with the image. Sometimes you don't see problems until you get it in to this final application... and sometimes worry areas blend in and become non issues so I don't spend a ton of time until this final fine tune stage.
Any questions don't hesitate to ask. But I will be out of town with no access tomorrow through Sunday so if you ask and I don't answer I'm not ignoring you.
if it was me, id dodge some parts of the leaves & pedals, burn in certain areas, selective sharpen the middle/yellow part of the flower and a few leaf wrinkles, underexpose and also desaturate/decolor the background w/ a selective layer mask, boost up the color saturation in lab colorspace and selectively mask, some hue adjustments, add contrast with a luminosity s curve, add a soft-light vignette, maybe a soft filter technique around the subject, etc, etc..
Dermit that was an awesome tutorial thanks very much for sharing it!! this is the kind of thing that continues to make FM worth hanging around. Il give it a go tonight and let you know how i did
I saw this thread and just recently did this extraction for this project I am on so thought I would document it and this seemed like a likely place for it. This specific method is probably overkill for the flower, but it offers an alternative way for the more difficult extractions.
There are several ways to do this extracting ranging from the fairly simple to the highly complex. Since there is reasonably good contrast between the flower and the background I chose to use the Extract Filter. Other equally good methods would be the Color Range command, or to use a Channel Mask as already explained.
Here are my steps:
1. Opened image in Photoshop and duplicated background layer (you'll see why later)
2. With the duplicated layer selected I used the Extraction tool by clicking Filter > Extract from the menu bar.
3. Now; there are a number of tricks to using the Extract filter. For this particular image I activated the Smart Highlighting option because of the contrast. This option shows four little bars on the inside of the brush diameter (circle). Press the square bracket keys ([ or ]} until the brush diamter is just wide enough to paint along the edge of the flower with some overlap on to the background. As long as you keep two of the bars on the element you're extracting and two on the background you will get a clean extraction.
4.After completing the extraction, I opened the History Palette and set the History State to the step where I duplicated the image by clicking in the box in the left column.
Then I selected the History Brush, set it to 40% Opacity, and painted in the areas where the extraction wasn't clean.
5. How do I know where to paint? By clicking the Visibility of the Background Layer on and off you will be able to determine the areas that need touching up. There wasn't much touch up needed; just two spots where the flower tended to merge with the background green.
And just for fun, here's the Extraction done using the Color Range command.
I'm glad it worked out for you.... looks quite nice. I wasn't sure what you wanted and extracting the flower only looked rather odd to me.
Extracting is an art by itself and it takes experience to figure out the appropriate tool for a particular job. In this case since you also wanted some of the leaves you could also use the Pen Tool which many people find difficult to master.
You guys are what FM is all about. Your detailed tutorials were great, and very much appreciated. Thanks for the time you took. You've each given me a few new arrows fof my quiver.
Do you know anything about layers and masks?