DSLR Photography Forum

(Lithospermum)
Try anything.
I would like to get rid of the background and just have the flower standing out but I cant cut out the flower easily.
Unless I am not using the correct tools. I have the basic 'Photoshop Elements' no version number given.



Happy playing.

Hi,

Had a quick play and cut the flower out and put on a black background. Not sure that's exactly what you want, but the principle is the same. I'm on my laptop today, so also using Elements. I used the magic wand tool to do the bulk of the selection, with the tolerance quite high (32). Then I reduced the tolerance on it to add in the remaining bits while holding the shift key. Any large areas the wand missed that were well away from the edges were added to the selection using the lasso tool while holding the shift key. Then zoomed it to a bigger size to fine tune the detail around the edges using either lasso or magic wand while holding shift to add to selectio or alt to remove bits that shoudn't be selected. (Sounds complicated and long-winded, but really only a couple of minutes work!). Next I copied the selected flower as a new layer, made a further new layer and filled it with black, deleted the original background layer and made the black layer the background. Hey presto - blue flower on black! I flattened the layers and cropped the image and added a touch of sharpening. Hope that helps! No doubt some of the more experienced PS people will show you other ways to do this too.



--NN

Thanks NN. Maybe thats where I am going wrong ,I don't use the shift key.
I will try that later. But thats along the lines I want.
I kept finding the magic wand, grabbed bits all over that I didn't want, even with the tolerance down.
I relaly will have to study the instructions.

Oh and funny enough...............I have and used to play a Tenor Sax. I gave it up as a bad job when I had all of my upper teeth removed. The embouchure disappeared overnight.

NT73 Wrote:Oh and funny enough...............I have and used to play a Tenor Sax. I gave it up as a bad job when I had all of my upper teeth removed. The embouchure disappeared overnight.

Ah I love the sound of a Sax! I started out on Clarinet many years ago, but always wanted to play Sax. Last year I finally took the plunge and bought two Altos...a Conn to play and a (very cheap) ancient Buescher TrueTone to repair. Unfortunately around 10 years of concentrating on guitar during which my asthma had worsened (and tobacco had taken its toll) meant that while I had no difficulty with embouchure or fingering I just don't have the lungs for it! So, the Conn has been resold to a home where it will be played, the Buescher is still waiting to be repaired (don't know that I've the heart for it when I won't have the satisfaction of playing it) and I'm back to guitar again!

--NN