Some kind of technique, or easier way?

Hello and thank you in advance for your time and effort. I work at a newspaper and one of our advertisers is a Car Dealership. Every week they will give us a new list of cars that they want to run in an ad in our paper.

The catch is this, they take the picture and then require us to "cut" the car out of the picture and put it back on a stock background picture. The only way I know how is to actually erase the background from the original picture and insert a new background behind the car. It is very time consuming to drag the erasers around every edge of the car. If your confused I will list two pictures for you, a before and a after picture. My question is, is there any type of method or any tool that I can use to just make photoshop select the car instantly without having to erase every single little detail from around it?
http://www.theclarion.org/before.jpg

Any help or ideas is greatly appreciated.
http://www.theclarion.org/after.jpg

One idea is that you can use the wand to select the backgrounds around it and delete chunks until you get something of a white outline. Then use the wand to select the white, and go to Select>Inverse. This one is probably still somewhat time consuming, though not as tedious as what you did.

Another method is the use the Magnetic Lasso Tool and drag an outline around the car. I'm not very familiar with this one and it can be kinda frustrating to make sure it doesn't go off course, but if you do the outline right, it's a very easy way to "cut" the car.

I hope that helps, although I'm sure someone with more experience could give you a better answer.(You did a great erasing though)

Thanks for the suggeestions. I'll give em' a try. It's truly time consuming when we have to do 21-24 cars like this each week.

hi,
the magnetic lasso would be a good choice... and the better the contrast is on the edges the better...

another possibilty is use your extract tool under filter menu....

bcoots said:

Hello and thank you in advance for your time and effort. I work at a newspaper and one of our advertisers is a Car Dealership. Every week they will give us a new list of cars that they want to run in an ad in our paper.

The catch is this, they take the picture and then require us to "cut" the car out of the picture and put it back on a stock background picture. The only way I know how is to actually erase the background from the original picture and insert a new background behind the car. It is very time consuming to drag the erasers around every edge of the car. If your confused I will list two pictures for you, a before and a after picture. My question is, is there any type of method or any tool that I can use to just make photoshop select the car instantly without having to erase every single little detail from around it?
http://www.theclarion.org/before.jpg

Any help or ideas is greatly appreciated.
http://www.theclarion.org/after.jpg