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| GREENWIZARD |
till the rain falls
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| Gilly |
This is sweet as GW! I love the black background....
can you share with me (and maybe the rest) how you get it like this please! Thank you 
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| creators |
Gorgeous! |
| the neepster |
That is stunning GW - and yes, please please do share the black background secret. |
| GREENWIZARD |
done on microsoft picture it 9
the background is freehand painted thanks for your kind comments |
| creators |
There are a number of ways to clean up a background or remove an object from one picture and place it in another. Greenwizards method is one that can be done without using layers, you just need a steady hand and some careful adjustments to how soft the brush is for the edges of the object and zoom in close to do them.
If you are familiar with layers, in Photoshop you can create a path using the Pen tool, click, hold and drag to create curves along your path, in this tutorial link this person creates a rough path first and edits later, but you can refine as you go using hold and drag for curves. http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/photoshop/l/blrbps_4abfly.htm I tend to use Paint Shop Pro for most of my work as it's a package I am most familiar with and have been using it for donkeys years, so the following will work in just about any program that has layers. If the background is fairly evenly coloured and you just want to darken or lighten it, duplicate the image to a new layer and select the background using the magic wand, aided by the 'lasso tool', hold 'shift' to add to a selection. Once I am happy with the selection I feather it by 2 or three pixels and hit delete a few times. If you switch off the background layer, (the little eye icon) you can refine the edges of the object with the eraser to get a nicely anti-aliased (blurred) edge. You can then paste a new background layer behind the object, fill the existing background layer with any colour you like (remember to make it visible again), or save the file as a PSD file to keep the object as a separated item, delete the background layer to reduce file size. Examine the edges of object in shots you have taken and get a feel for how the edges blend with their background, things in sharp focus will have very little blending at the edge, two or three pixels, things out of focus will have a much wider area of blend. In order for your work to be believable you must replicate the same edge on the new background. Blurred edges, though, limit how radically you can change the background colour. In the picture below I was using the eraser tool to go round the edge, you can clearly see how much blur there was between the skin and the background, so I chose an eraser density to match that and removed enough of the skin (about three pixels) to lose all the background colour. 
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| creators |
I forgot to mention. There are many who will sneer if you aren't using the Pen tool in Photoshop, and who'll tell you you're wasting time. I use any tool that gives me the result I want, and, yes, some methods are more long winded than others. That really doesn't matter if you get a believable result using tools you are most familiar with. Save the more sophisticated tools for practice later and don't start using unfamiliar tools on a picture that you are doing serious work on.
This is a picture I did for Mike (Venom) using the eraser tool almost exclusively and the result is photo quality even if I do say so myself. 
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