Needing to make a Photoshop task a little more efficient.

Steve Schulze

Hey guys.
I've been doing work on an antique pottery book for my dad. A big part of the process is taking photos like this one:

And cutting out the background with a layer mask. There's an awful lot of these and I'm struggling to find a really efficient way to get through them. For the most part I've either been using the magic wand or the magnetic lasso with some hand painted cleanup, both of which are a bit slow.

It's unlikely that there'll be any kind of magic bullet solution that won't need a bit of touching up, but I'd be interested to hear if anyone had any suggestions that might make things a little bit quicker.

daemoria

I would suggest trying a high contrast background that's easy to color pick and serves as a quick mask. The white you have in this photo seems like it'll cause you problems, instead use a bright magenta or something similar.

Check your local arts and craft store for large sheets of paper to serve as a nice backdrop.

Additionaly you can make a custom recorded action to clamp the levels of the image via layer modifer, allowing you to quickly select the background. It might take some playing around with the settings to turn it into something you can use tho, depending on the background and your pottery color. .


step 2

step 3

step 4




I should mention a step i forgot to preform when i was making this mockup... you can delete the layer masks off of the modifier layers, you dont need them, and can possibly lead to confusion.

Your final layer should be a new layer with a mask to ensure the color selection action is not applied to your modifier layers.

If all goes well, your new action you recorded should enable a quick creation of layer modifiers/selection group in a nice non-destructive method.

--

I hope this helped somewhat.

Joopson

With a magenta background, won't it reflect the pink and screw up how the pottery looks, as a result?

s6

Joopson wrote: »

With a magenta background, won't it reflect the pink and screw up how the pottery looks, as a result?

Not if its only underneath the pottery. But that is assuming most of the potter is flat, or in chunks like the sample image.

That would be my advice as well. Use a neon blue/green/pink back drop, Use the quick selection tool/magic wand/Select by color range for a base selection, The use 'refine edge' to drive it home.

The process below is simple, Quick, and requires very little clean up. I only had to hand clean up one spot, that i probably could have ignored if i wanted to.


So first, I started with the quick selection tool, starting from the most solid white, making my way through the shadows on the matte using Shift and ALT to select desired areas and clear off undesired areas.

It will tend to select the whole image, That's normal. This tool is said to "learn" as you go. So if it does this, Just alt deselect the pieces you desire to keep un-selected.

The same thing can be accomplished with the Magic wand. But i don't think that tool adapts to your selection as you go.








After that, Select/Refine Edge and fiddle with the Radius, Contrast, smooth, and shift edge. Up at the top of the dialog you can choose how it displays the selection. I went with white for ease of seeing the edge.










Then Viola. Mask.








The higher contrast your matte material/background, the easier it will be.



If you do go with a colorful backdrop, As Daemoria said, You can use Select by color range your initial selection, And proceed to refine it with the refine edge command.




Another imagine, Before and After, Took maybe 3 minutes from finding the image to saving it out. No manual clean up.


Before


After

Xolo

Perhaps this plugin would be good for you:
http://mikes3d.com/extra/scripting-plugins/killwhite/

huffer

I had to clean a lot of these in past graphic design jobs, and the fastest/best method was simply making path selections with pen tool. (We didn't had colored backgrounds). I could process something like 30 per hour using a graphic tablet, and I had perfect results from the start, no messy clean-up involved. Draw path selection - make selection with 1 px feather - create mask.

Steve Schulze

Thanks for the help guys. I was stuck with an older version of Photoshop and worse, no graphic tablet, so I couldn't use all of these techniques, but I still got a couple of handy hints that made things a little bit less cumbersome.

Cheers.

SanderDL

Have you tried Shoebox? It has a mask tool that you could use.

It will still require some cleanup but maybe it will speed things up.