Removing complex background

[tongcreator]

On 1/29/2021 at 2:43 PM, jmwellborn said:

@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.     

I feel half harrassed and half lectured from all these off topic posts.

[tongcreator]

On 1/30/2021 at 4:36 AM, anon2 said:

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.

I don't know what to say about that. I'm just making a design for someone and half the comments are off topic. Yes the ears were cut because the owner probably thought it looked good. I don't agree with it either but this is a forum for help and not opinions.  Gonna delete this forum if I can

[tongcreator]

23 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, 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! 

 

Pen tool. Got it, thanks.

[tongcreator]

On 1/30/2021 at 9:34 AM, firstdefence said:

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

Still editable

Can be duplicated and rasterised to facilitate edge refinement

 

Thank you. I'll see the tutorial for pen tools

[tongcreator]

21 hours ago, v_kyr said:

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.

 

 

Ohhh I see. Thank you for the help

[jmwellborn]

51 minutes ago, tongcreator said:

I feel half harrassed and half lectured from all these off topic posts.

So sorry.  It's just a cold, rainy or snowy or just plain awful (depending upon where we are all living) part of the year, with almost 11 months of Covid-19 lockdown, waiting for a vaccine, masks, distancing, and other fun things going on in all of our lives.  Yes, this topic has strayed left, right, and down the middle, but you should see how some topics meander!! 😲  The important thing is that we have been offered some excellent solutions and I -- at least -- have learned so much, as usual from trying the solutions people have offered.  I am currently getting ready to work on @firstdefence's explanation of how to create the shadow.   Beats staring at the cold, interminable drizzle outside!!!   So don't give up on everybody here.   So much to learn, so much time (socially-distanced)😣