Needing help on how to isolate an image and make it a transparent PNG

[Gippaloo]

Hi all! I hope this post makes sense I am trying to take the image of Tim Curry in the pic attached and pretty much cut him out from the background and make him a PNG image with a transparent background. Can anyone help me on how to go about this? I appreciate any help or advice! I am a bit of a newbie at these sort of things Thank you so much!!

[GarryP]

The quality of that picture is quite bad.

You might be better-off looking for a different one.

Whether you proceed with that image or not there are various ways to do what you want but each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

I would suggest searching the forums for isolate subject or select person and/or looking at the 2.6 beta which contains some new selection tools.

[Alfred]

At its simplest, to isolate a subject (without the use of the new selection tools that are currently in beta) I would start by using the Pen Tool to draw an approximate semitransparent masking shape and then use the Node Tool to refine that shape:

The semitransparency (or partial opacity) allows you to see where the masking shape needs tweaking for a better fit, in this case mainly just below the shoulders. Once you’ve tweaked it to your satisfaction, set the opacity of the fill to 100%. Here’s what it looks like without any fiddly tweaking at the shoulders:

Now go to the Layers panel, drag on the curve layer and drop it onto the thumbnail of the background layer to mask the photo so that only the main subject is visible: