I was talking to a college student and she said extracting a person or object out of a photo with CS4 only took a few seconds. Is there any truth to this or was she pulling my leg? I guess CS4 has a better extract tool under the filter menu, or is it the same as CS2. I will upgrade if I can get perfect extractions in a few minutes.
The old extract tool is only on the CD that CS4 comes on, it is no longer a part of the package. Adobe is redoing the tool and it will show up in a later version with a make over. It can be incorporated into CS4 when you load it off the disk, but I am sure it is the same version as what is in CS3.
The selection tools have not changed much except color range for selections so I do not know what she could be referring to.
I think the person is referring to improvements in the 'Refine Edge' command in CS4. Refine Edge was introduced in CS3 and in conjunction with the quick select tool you could very quickly extract a somewhat high contrast object. The refinements to 'Refine Edge' in CS4 does a better job of selecting difficult things like fur and hair. Its got going to be perfect though, but it does better in several cases where it would fail in CS3.
It can be done in a few seconds in CS3 or CS4. The plugin required is called Primatte 3.0 and is available from www.digitalanarchy.com. I do events where we photograph upwards of 200 people in an evening and extract and layer them on new backgrounds of their choice. Without Primatte it would be very difficult to do all of this real time. On my E6600 processor it takes 10-15 seconds to process the image and remove the original (chroma-key) background.
