I've been wanting to learn the basics of photoshop for a while, but I just can't figure anything out. One thing that's been bugging me forever is how I can't figure out how to cut things out of an image (I swear I can't find any tutorials -_-).



Take this pic for example. How can I cut out the dark templar (scythe included) without having to manually copy each little pixel??

Zoom in really close and manually draw around the outside with the freehand selection tool.

That's about it. Its the best way to do it too.

I would add a mask to the picture and then separate what I want from what I don't want.

Also, here is a trick that could be good for what you want. I believe it should work in Photoshop:

For most hard/crisp edges the lasso tool works wonder. You could probably even get away with magnet lasso tool when dealing with vectors. things like smoke, hair, and other dynamic edges need masks and sometimes just need to be nearly completely erased and re created manually. But yea:



Alternatively if you're lazy like me you can head over to gamerenders.com (a great place with many tutorials to learn how to make 'cool' sigs. The techniques can be applied to anything that's not just a signature) or planetrenders.com and get pre rendered images. They have that same exact picture already rendered.

It depends how accurate you want your approach to be.

I am not familiar with photoshop because I use GIMP and InkScape.

If you want to do it loosely like a cartoon, I'd recommend auto-tracing feature to vector out the outline and have it over the image. With a thicker outline you won't have to trace as accurately.

If you want to take the harder route, you should cut the image out by erasing around it, etc. and put in infinite labor (it's very hard to do but doable with a mouse; with a pen based tablet a bit easier). And fix inconsistencies by manually painting over with transparent colors on a transparent layer above the original image.

Save a copy of the original image at the bottom layer. Put a white background layer on top, and your working image layer above that. You need to set white of your working image to transparency.



To simplify the image, I set red and white and reddish orange to transparency.



Smudge tool is useful in smoothing out the roughness of the cut out image. It's also useful to blend in the transparent green blade with the white background.

Here's the raw file I was working on.

http://www.mediafire.com/?nypzc6ncueb6jk5

Another approach with the blade would be to copy the image, and set all the colors other than green to transparency, making the blade the only remaining object. Then you can tweak with its color, brightness, contrast, etc. and erase the blade on the other copy and paste it over

Post has been edited 5 time(s), last time on Apr 11 2011, 3:34 am by SiberianTiger.

If you have Photoshop CS5, you could use the magicbrush tool.
For previous versions you could do Select > Color Range, then hold shift and drag over the color range you want, then use the deselect dropper and shift drag over anything you don't want, and that should give a pretty good selection.

Learn to put pictures in your post properly...


Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 10 2011, 4:36 pm by Apos.

For one, that's a poorly compressed JPEG, so color range and similar things will probably give you rectangular boxes as a result of the compression artifacts. It's going to be hard to extract the psi-scythe, but the hard edges should be fine.

Always use a clipping mask for things like this. ALWAYS.

4:40 for edge selection refining tools

I realized that. I tried various edge detecting methods and they all churned out colored boxes.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 11 2011, 11:11 pm by Apos. Reason: Can't remember writing this but w/e...

Use noise removal filters?