The Key to Perfect Cut Out Images
Votes: 535I figured using a keyw ould be perfect, so here it is
Click to download and follow along.
Step 1
Load up photoshop and open this image. Now Photoshop CS3 has some fancy new features and even earlier versions as well to help with this task, but we are going to go over the older way of doing things and in later guides I will share the new wealth.
Using the magic wand, select the blue area. I had to do some angular marquee work as well for some pesky areas, but bear with me, this trick works wonders on a ncie solid contrasting background.
Using SHIFT+Click with the magic wand will let you add to your selection, and ALT+Click will subtract. I used the folowing options
You may need to adjsut the Tolerance as required for differend images, for the tricky areas with reflections I had to use a tolerance of 10.
Step 2 - Make a mask
With our cutout object selected hit the image mask button on the layer pallet
This will create an inverse selection, this assumes we want to keep ou selected bits, but we want the opposite. So making sure the layer MASK is selected, hit CTRL+I (APPLE+I), this will invert the mask.
I know what you're thinking " This is butt ugly and not very clean of a key, it's all jagged". Continue to step 3.
Step 3 - Make it Niiiice
Making sure the mask is again selected, goto filers / Blur / Guassian Blur
We'll use 3 pixels, it essentially says how many pixels of "play" to we want to either bring the edge in or out.
Now your canvas should look like this.
But again, the edges are fuzzy, the magic is in this "gray" area. We are going to sharpen those edges using the curves tool, in image / Adjustments / Curves - This is the best tool ever.
Many people don't understand what "curves" do, but think of it as a constant ramp of color value, black being at the bottom and white being at the top. We want to change that constant ramp into a nice sharp drop off. Naw making sure you have the mask selected, but viewing the main convas, adjsut the curves like so, you'll find the steeper your curve the sharper the edge. I encourage you to play with this and experiment.
Step 4 - Remove the blue reflection
Although not the focus of this article, lets remove that relfection of blue, it looks funny.
I simply used the Replace color tool from Image / Adjustments / Replace Color. Now we need to switch from "Mask mode" to the real world, so select your image, not the mask, from the layers pallet, and select the blue reflection, and bring it's saturation down to 0. Much better.
5 Final Notes
I added a soft drop shadow for fun, download the final PSD file here.
This guide was just that, a guide, not rules, or laws. Being a graphics designer is like being a pirate, "...they're more like guidlines anyway...", we do what works to get the result we want, this is one way to get there.
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