Removing a Almost same color same Saturation background.

Ok you might think this is a newbie question and if it is I'm sorry. but it seems a bit more advanced to me. I have this photo of a character (yes it's anime and I know how people here think it's a dying art form and whatever else) But anyway has on a black dress and and black hair. but her skin is white. I have tried to use the Alpha channel Threshold tech but it makes the BG to dark. I have halso tried the AC Curves tech but that doesn't get and exact enough selection and it leaves this Halo around it that i can't even get rid of when i erase it by hand.
I really need some help on this........

Then there is only one thing to do. Manual extraction by using the pen tool to draw an outline around the character and turn it into a selection, cutting it out of the picture.

You could also double-click the image, turn the picture background into "layer 0", then apply a layer mask to it and use all the tools available of photoshop to hide the unwanted background parts. Remember to color with black on the mask to make pixels transparent. The good reason to use this method is that if you screw up, you can use white and bring back parts of the image you want, without having to rely on photoshop's history undo.

And if its a hard-lined drawing like I think it is, cutting it out of a background shouldn't be that hard at all.

Yeah that's good advice for an actual Normal anime character...But this one is a CG rendition of an anime character. So her hair and all that has very fine lines in it which is what I am trying to get if i dont it looks like i cut it out with scissors

Post the image and lets see what you are working with.

I'll bet you can use Deke's "high pass" method to get a selection.

Here it is. Direct link doesn't work on Angelfire for some reason. So Click the Link at the VERY BOTTOM of the page. Oh yeah and don't look at the otehr crap on there it sucks LOL


Picture of Lulu

Cake. That selection WAS NOT hard.
I've spent Full DAYS on a single selection.

As you can see I didn't do ANY fine tuning. I got my original selection from simply duplicating and threshold'in the "Green" channel, and then painting it in. There is a tutorial on my site that will show you the basics of what I did.
http://cbutts.com/masking1 <--you'll learn somethin'

The .psd file that I used is ]here, <--(right-click "save link as") you can clean the mask up, (or the duplicate green channel) and have what you wan't.

Yeah mine looks alot like that. i posted the background that i used it on in the digital showroom. i asked you beucase i showed to people on the Znses board and they kept complaining that "she looks too rough" And "why couldn't you cut it out better" The girl on the right side of my BG is pretty badly cut out. but they said ALL of them needed fine tuning, and that the BG pretty much sucked.

Thx ALOT though I jsut needed to hear whether I could have made a better selection than I did on mine from some mature enough not to jump on the "Someone said it's looks like ****, so let's ALL do it bandwagon"