The original on the left was shot in a square in Jaipur, India but the background is too intrusive despite being out of focus. So we are going to have a go at diffusing the background a lot more. As there is a strong highlight in the background this will need selecting and darkening before we embark on the main exercise. The first stage main exercise is to select just the old man and as you can see we shall have problems with the hair. So how do we select. In Photoshop 5 the programme we`ll be using there are several ways of selecting areas. First there are the lasso tools - three of them. The freehand , polygon and magnetic.

If we were to attempt to use any of these on our image it would be quite difficult and time consuming. I often use the polygon tool to make selections adding to and subtracting from the selection by using the shift and alt keys respectively. The magnetic tool is new to Photoshop 5 but I rarely use it. The magic wand ( next to the lasso ) can be useful sometimes, but the one I`m going to use for this image is colour range

1. First magnify a small section around the edge you want to select.

2. Using one of the lasso selection tools select an area around the edge

3. Go to the Selection menu and choose colour range

4. Select background colours and adjust the fuzziness to suit.

Note--- if you don`t choose a small area by selection the image in colour range will be too large for you to use

5. Save the selection as a channel

6. choose another close-up selection with a slight overlap of the previous selection. Then
repeat actions 3 and 4.

7. Save the selection ADDING the previous saved selection.

8. Move round the edge adding to your selection not forgetting to save as you go

9. You could also fill the selection with white as you go round the edge

10. Clean up by using quick mask

With some images it may be necessary to reduce the grain before selection by duplicating the image layer and using despeckle and smart blur. By reducing the noise but not destroying the edge detail, selection can be made easier and on completion of the selection the `grainless` layer can be replaced by the original.

 

Finally catch lights were added to the eyes which were also lightened a fraction and the image sharpened by using unsharp mask in LAB Mode. Using LAB Mode enables you to sharpen just the black and white channel - ( lightness ) .

You could do these to the head layer before merging the layers together and saving the final image.

 

images copyright richard tucker

Please note that in Photosop v5.5 'Extract' will do a good job of selecting. Remember though it is a good idea to do the 'extract' on a duplicate layer . If you are fortunate enough to have Corel Knockout this will also be more than useful in selecting. Extensis too have a plug-in for doing selecting.

To avoid the halo that sometimes occurs around the selection its a good idea to add an extra cutout layer.Proceed as follows.
1. Having done your selection duplicate the layer naming one the original, the other the background.
2. Select the background layer and making sure the ants are marching round the head, cut out the head by going to Layer/New Layer via Cut.
3. Now we select the ' background ' layer (with your selection cut out) and use Gaussian Blur to put the background out of focus. The amount to use will depend on the situation. You will have to experiment with differing amount of gaussian blur.