Refine is driving me insane

[sbishop1488]

Hi,

 

I'm having a real issue selecting a watch I photographed against a plain cream wall.  I want to simply replace the wall with black.  I used the selection tool to make a rough selection and it wouldn't pick up the edge of the watch since it was a very similar shade but you could still see a faint line of the watch edge.  I added a new Layer Mask and went to refine that same thing as the selection.  Using Refine (Matte) I go round the edges but rather than add to the mask it removes it, can't see any reason why and its the same for a selection, am I doing something daft here?

 

All help appreciated :-)

[toltec]

Use a clipping path. There are times when selections and refining edges are a waste of time. As you have just discovered. 

 

When colours are very similar, it is too much like hard work.

 

Trace round the watch with the Pen Tool and edit the path with the Node Tool.

 

Click on Mask on the Context Toolbar when you have finished  (Photo only) use Mask to Below in designer.

That will remove the background (below)

 

 

Place a Fill layer behind.

 

 

That only took me about 5 minutes but admittedly, is not perfect. Spend a bit of time to get the path right!

 

No Selections, no Refine Edges, no Insanity 

 

[carl123]

@sbishop1488

Upload the picture if you can, different pictures need different techniques

[sbishop1488]

Here's the photo, it's the left hand side of the watch face that's causing the biggest issue, but its struggling to be honest with most of the image  using the selection tools.  Could only upload a low res version of it I'm afraid. Cheers I'll have to give that clipping path a go, but I would have thought this would have being a pretty easy selection.

[toltec]

This area is the problem. There is no contrast there.

 

 

If you are dead set on painting, try Quick Mask mode. Press Q and paint with black or white paint. 

 

But I would use a clipping path every day.

 

[carl123]

With something like this I would first create an ellipse the exact size of the round part of the watch, then convert that ellipse to a selection, from then on just switch to the selection brush to select the rest of the watch.

After refining you can output as a new layer, reselect the stored selection, invert it and hit delete to get rid of any pixels that may be bleeding into the background

[v_kyr]

Well generally when photographing such items and you already know you will have to extract it, you should choose a different even colored background, so that the motif settles everywhere well from the background. Since that always eases any later subject extraction work, also make sure you don't have any color mixed in shadow falling then. You can take a look at some sites which deal with product photography here to get an overall idea.

Related to selections for subject extractions, there are generally several different techniques which can be used. When in trouble with difficult to handle subject/background color shifting, it sometimes helps to develop and apply a very contrast rich B&W silhouette image of the subject for masking purposes here.