Removing complex background

[tongcreator]

I've looked at tutorials for this, but I could not find a great solution to this. What's the best way to go about removing the background from this dog?

[harrym]

Not at my computer at the moment but normal select brush to edges with refine doesn't work?

[v_kyr]

 

 

 

[jmwellborn]

@v_kyr  Ouch!!!  The stick and that yellow thing are poking the poor dog. 😳.  Couldn’t resist, although I really know that you were just demonstrating with a preliminary selection.  😊

[v_kyr]

3 hours ago, jmwellborn said:

@v_kyr  Ouch!!!  The stick and that yellow thing are poking the poor dog. 😳.  Couldn’t resist, although I really know that you were just demonstrating with a preliminary selection.  😊

Well there is also a tool called the background eraser, which people have to train too!

[tongcreator]

19 hours ago, harrym said:

Not at my computer at the moment but normal select brush to edges with refine doesn't work?

I tried and it's very rough. It's super tedious and not perfect

[tongcreator]

19 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Well there is also a tool called the background eraser, which people have to train too!

That actually works? I can try it

[jmwellborn]

13 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Well there is also a tool called the background eraser, which people have to train too!

Here is Fido, dutifully erased, but I must say I had a lot more success with the Eraser Tool and a wee bit of Inpainting to sort out the mud on his feet and the blotchy stuff on his tongue and under his eyes.😊

[jmwellborn]

4 minutes ago, tongcreator said:

Sorry? What is poking it. Did I do something wrong?

No.  It was just that when @v_kyr posted a sample -- possibly to show you how you can use the Selection Brush Tool to get rid of the background  -- some of that yellow stuff plus a couple of branches were left in.  I was just being silly as it looked as though the branches were sticking into the rear of the dog.   Sorry.   Meanwhile, if you do use the Selection Brush Tool (selecting the dog), after you refine your selection you can always save your selection as a New Layer With Mask.  You can then use your Eraser Tool to spruce up his edges.  

[Old Bruce]

Those 'branches' are guy lines from a power pole, I recognize them because over my many decades I have walked into them several times (in broad daylight being cold stone sober, just , you know, thinking about stuff and things).

[Ron P.]

@tongcreator

Having photographed dogs for a local animal shelter, and having to touch them up, I knew ahead of time I wanted to minimize my post-processing. So I made sure to photograph them in a suitable location. Here's a link to my flicker account where I still have some of those images. Each of the dogs had leashes on them, which I removed in Affinity Photo, as well as touching up/removing some items near them or in the background. It is time consuming to do the job right for the customers, or for that matter for yourself 😉

For pitbull terriers always try to capture/photo them in the most positive and relaxing way. I notice the large chain on your dog. That is a subtle way of conveying the animal is aggressive, when in fact they're cuddly and lovable.

Shelter Dogs

 

[jmwellborn]

@Ron P.  Beautiful dogs, and beautifully photographed!  The nicest thing is their happy faces.  No stomach-churning, heartbreaking shots of shivering, starving, terrified animals while advertising for "only $19.00 per month" while having spent several hundreds of thousands on a glitzy TV ad.  Or worse, having discovered as I did several years ago, that one of these national organizations spends a chunk of money supporting the political campaigns of certain public figures.   However, I am wildly off topic of this post.     

[v_kyr]

When I knew that I would like to make some good pictures/shots of my (imaginary, I don't have a) dog, I for sure wouldn't place him on a background like that one, which has similar color tones as his fur. - Instead, I would make the same effort as if I were photographing one of my models, i.e. making sure that the background and lighting conditions are appropriate. Here especially when I know that I may later want to reuse them probably cutted out from the initial choosen background.

Such images like the above one are probably good ones for testing AI-driven autoseletion algorithms, in order to see how good trained these are in distingushing the main subject of attraction from the similar colored background.

[Ron P.]

@jmwellborn Everyone of those dogs I photographed, were adopted within 30 days. I was very happy I was able to help with that. Cost them $0.00 for that.

[tongcreator]

On 1/29/2021 at 7:17 PM, anon2 said:

It's disgusting that the dog's ears were mutilated for real instead of just erased from a photo.

Can you not please...I'm asking for help and this is so off topic. This is not my dog nor image I captured.

[tongcreator]

23 hours ago, v_kyr said:

 

What did you use? Thanks

 

 

 

[tongcreator]

5 hours ago, jmwellborn said:

Here is Fido, dutifully erased, but I must say I had a lot more success with the Eraser Tool and a wee bit of Inpainting to sort out the mud on his feet and the blotchy stuff on his tongue and under his eyes.😊

Wow! I wish I could see how you did this.

[jmwellborn]

2 hours ago, tongcreator said:

Wow! I wish I could see how you did this.

Tomorrow.  But I purloined @v_kyr's work and just spruced it up.  He deserves the credit.  

[firstdefence]

Best method for complex backgrounds is to use the pen tool to create a mask of the dog. It is tedious but at the end you have an editable mask.

 

[lepr]

8 hours ago, tongcreator said:

Can you not please...I'm asking for help and this is so off topic. This is not my dog nor image I captured.

I could tell the dog is/was not yours by the wording of your opening post and I was not blaming you for the condition of the animal.

You didn't capture the image but you posted it in this public forum, apparently without consideration for the people (such as myself) who would be upset by an image of a mutilated animal.

You are free to post imagery that offends me, so please accept my freedom to comment on it.

[Ron P.]

I took a shot at removing the background and the leash. At first I cropped it, then removed the leash. Then convinced myself to try and remove the background. I used the selection tool, and found myself chasing the foreground and background options in the refine selection. This is where I finally stopped.

 

[firstdefence]

Using the pen tool, took about 5mins including the shadow doodle.

Still editable

Can be duplicated and rasterised to facilitate edge refinement

 

[jmwellborn]

I give up @firstdefence,  @Ron P. and @tongcreator!!  The pen tool selection is far and away easier than the Selection Brush Tool for this dog, but it took me somewhat more than 5 minutes, having suffered the odd accidental Delete. (I had purloined @v_kyr's selection work previously.)  Anyway, I got the dog to the Selection from Layer and Refine stage, to New Mask Layer.  Then I used the Eraser Brush Tool with a pixel setting of about 12 p and very carefully worked around the dog's body to get a very crisp edge (which I now see missed the top of his left ear and part of his nose ☹️).  Even down to 2 p around his feet.  And then it was time to remove his thumping great chain collar.  The Inpainting Brush Tool worked a little bit, but there was way too much concentrated silver in the way.  So with extremely marginal results I used the Clone Brush Tool and tried to match the various and sundry shades of tan to sorrel.  There are bits of silver still showing through.  Then I used a fur brush tool set at a very small pixel size, and the color picker to try to get some hair on his chest and leg. Then I used a texture brush set at a very low opacity and brushed over the hairs.  Then I used the Smudge Tool to try to blend all that stuff in.  Then I thought "I will never get this right.  Forget it!" and gave the idea of the shadow about 2 seconds before I threw in the towel.  Hats off to you @firstdefence.    Have a good weekend everybody! 

 

[firstdefence]

The shadow is full/opaque black with a 65-75% hardness brush for a slightly soft edge and then the layer opacity dropped to about 28% 

Painting the shadow full black gets around the colour buildup when using a reduced opacity brush.

Dog.afphoto

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, jmwellborn said:

I give up @firstdefence,  @Ron P. and @tongcreator!!  The pen tool selection is far and away easier than the Selection Brush Tool for this dog, but it took me somewhat more than 5 minutes ...

Well for good selections it always depends on an image main subject and background colors and how good these can be distinguished here in color contrast terms from each other. Sometimes other selection techniques than the Selection Brush do work good and sometimes the selection brush needs some other pre-adjustment work (some help) in order to get an half way accurate selection.

For example, when I have to deal with such images, where the main subject and the background in an image have very similar colors, I first tweak a duplicate image layer to give me something like a limited colored silhouette or bw representation. So I and the selection algorithms can more easily distinguish the main subject from the background ...

... then I can create quickly and much more easily (even with the selection brush tool) a half way good initial selection, next I fine tune that selection ...

... with finer brush add/delete adjustments etc. If things look Ok, I take that selection over to the main image layer and apply the selection, in order to extract the object of my interest, or I invert the selection to remove all other unwanted background parts.

Though for my portrait work I don't rely much on Affinity's selection tools here, since I have and use other tools which offer better selection algorithms and overall capabilities for such tasks.