So I've taken a rather quick photo of my neighbors christmas cactus for him, but the choice of backgrounds was not the greatest. Does anyone have any tried and true methods of extracting the cactus and it's cart from the garage doors and wall behind it? I'm stumped and would really like to put it against a clean background for printing and framing for him
Well gee whiz, why didn't I think of that? Thanks so much for your worthwhile assistance. The plant was extremely fragile and could not be moved easily to a cleaner location, believe me, I thought of that. This plant is over 150 years old and the last thing I wanted to do was bounce it around. Yes, I cut off small pieces on the top and bottom to avoid even MORE problems.
Jo - It would take a little while but would not be impossible, to draw an actual Path around the whole plant, including the interior areas where wall shows through. For an item with hard edges, it would be a very precise way to work. At the same time, you could expand the canvas and use the end of some of the leaves to paste on to the cut off leaves in order to complete them and leave (no pun intended) clean outline. How much time you want to spend is completely up to you and if it's a personal project, it might be worth the effort. How amazing that that plant is so old and looking so great.
Jo Dilbeck wrote:
So I've taken a rather quick photo of my neighbors christmas cactus for him, but the choice of backgrounds was not the greatest. Does anyone have any tried and true methods of extracting the cactus and it's cart from the garage doors and wall behind it? I'm stumped and would really like to put it against a clean background for printing and framing for him
Thanks in advance!
Jo
maybe some smart masking based on colors, the plant might not have much in common with the background?
Seamless paper will be your friend here. B&H sells it but it looks like you only need about 8'. If you lived near me I'd give you some. But since you are in Calif perhaps you could find a pro studio shooter who would give/sell you some.
Using a combination of RustyBug's look at the individual channels, and Select Color will get you a pretty good initial selection. Then you can adjust the mask settings, and use the brush to further refine the mask if you need it.
This image is quite difficult to mask because of the green background is close to the color of the cactus but it can be done. The example image is too small and doesn't have enough resolution to spend much time over so here's a quick try using the Red and Blue channels in the Calculations command.
From this stage it could be refined by applying a Levels adjustment to drive it close to black and white, then use the Brush tool in Overlay Mode and the Dodge Tool on the edges to make it entirely black and white.
A larger image with more resolution will give you much better results.
