In one of my “Alpha Channel” vids I mentioned I’d cover this topic. Well, I finally got around to it. Turns out I needed to do this for a real-world situation. I was designing a website for a client and wound up needing to extract a glass from one photo and place it in another photo. Along the way I fell in love with Content Aware Scale, then just as quickly fell out of love. I’m so fickle.
PHOTOSHOP
In this screencast we explore 4 different ways to extract hair from an image in order to composite it into a different background. Once again, Alpha Channels play a major role, but we also explore some Blending options in order to achieve great results. I contend that there is no one “best” way to mask hair, but if you have an arsenal of different techniques at your disposal you can usually wind up with a successful result employing one or several of the techniques I explore here. This screencast assumes a fairly advanced level of Photoshop knowledge, as I don’t spend a lot of time explaining functions that I think an advanced Photoshop user would know.
More info on Alpha Channels, and we use Color Range to begin a complex selection process. In the end we wind up with 2 different Alpha Channels for separate selections and combine them into one selection from which we make our layer mask. Powerful goodness!
In this screencast I give some practical application to this whole concept of selections and masking using Alpha Channels in Photoshop. We look at 2 different images and 2 different approaches of creating a mask to knock out an object from the background.
A lot of people are confused about Alpha Channels in Photoshop. In fact, Alpha Channels are very useful, very powerful, and not that difficult to understand. In this screencast I introduce you to the basic concepts around Alpha Channels, explain what they do and how you can use them to enhance your Photoshop experience.
