by
Rusty » Thu Oct 15, 2009 2:46 pm
Bridget, you have a nice, sharp image and, as I suspected, the
Magic Wand did a good job selecting the unwanted background. Start off by duplicating your BG layer and turn the eyeball off on the BG. Zoom in to 100% and use your magic wand to click in the gray area around the hands. Pay attention to the marching ants to see what is being selected. If it starts slopping over into the figure,
reduce the sensitivity of the wand. The default is "32" and you may be able to see here that I reduced it down to "13".
- Select-1.jpg (132.51 KiB) Viewed 1661 times
You don't have to do it all at once. Get a bit selected and then hit the delete key. Because you have turned off the eyeball of your BG layer, you can see exactly what progress you are making.
- Select-2.jpg (143.4 KiB) Viewed 1661 times
Move over to another part of the image and, with the magic wand, click some more just outside the edges of the person.
- Select-3.jpg (146.4 KiB) Viewed 1661 times
I would ignore everything except just the parts touching the figure. When you are all finished, just use the eraser tool to wipe off those parts.
- Select-4.jpg (117.09 KiB) Viewed 1660 times
You can see that I still have some gray touching the hand on the left side. You could use the magic wand or, probably easier, just select with the polygon lasso tool to delete. The magic wand does most of the heavy lifting. There is some white still around the hair but as you say a white canvas is your aim, that is not going to matter.
You might even want to run thru this twice. I would do it once with no feathering to the selection. Then, on another copy of the file, do it again with the selection feathered 1-or-2-or-3 pixels right before hitting the delete key. Experiment and see what looks best to you.
Rusty