Is there a way to do a perfect background removal on hair?

Question

Is there a way to do a perfect die cut on a person's hair or on dog's fur or others like difficult hair styles?

Similar to this:

Answer 1

1 - Make a quick selection with quick selection tool (w)

2 - Edit your selection select> refine edge

3 - Choose On layers View mode

4 - Define Edge detection to a correct radius (depends on resolution of your image), check Smart radius

5 - Adjust edge with different variables.

6 - Use Refine radius tool (E) on hair or fur

6 - Sometimes, you will need to refine edge several times to have perfect select

Answer 2

There are lots of ways to achieve it. Here I'm going to follow Image>Calculations: This is my calculations below..

Then I Go to the Channels to select newly created Alpha Channel and Apply Levels By Clicking Ctrl+L to make it more clear.

And Finally I've got a better result to select hair, properly. I think, It is one of the easy and best to way to select hair in such type of image.

Answer 3

To remove a monochrome background we can add an alpha layer replacing the background color by transparency.

To leave the foreground objects non-transparent we may have to make a selection of the background by fuzzy select (magic wand tool) or by color selection. Hair may need to be unselected manually in addition. It is also a good idea to generously feather the selection.

1. Make a selection of the background color and include hair manually:

   

2. Transform background color to alpha:

   

3. Replace background (done by copy & paste the image on the new background)

   

The point of this approach is to have some of the background shine through by transparency on the hair or on other fuzzy regions in the foreground objects.

We can see that the image grain noise from the example source will be preserved. This may be a wanted effect to better merge the foreground and background image qualtity. If not this noise has to be removed beforehand.

Answer 4

Personally I would normally put a background color that stands out and by hand remove the background elements.

This is a personal option as it comes out better than any select tool.

To allow you more information on the way I would do this I shall do a step by step.

1. I would remove as much of the background as possible.
2. Then using the fill tool I would create a layer behind the element im trying to cut out.
3. This would be a color that stands out like bright red or green (depending on the targets color).
4. I would zoom in to my area I wish to remove, first backing up the the layer via duplicate.
5. Then I would proceed to use the hard delete brush and keeping one pixel in and doing this very slowly remove the blue pixels.
6. The contrast of the background will allow me to see if I missed any.
7. After a timely removal I would then change the background color layer to different colors to see if it works in most if not all colors. (This will help you find missing pixels of color)
8. Once completed I would save the item to keep a transparent cut out one before moving on to using the element.

Hope that updated edit helped more.

Answer 5

There's a lot of techniques for this, the secret to find them is a thing called Google :)

Spoongraphics - handy techniques for cutting out hair in Photoshop

Peachpit - extracting hair