Extracting a foreground from a background

Over the course of the next few movies, we're going to take this falcon, which comes to us from the Fotolia image library, about which you can learn more at Fotolia.com/deke, and we're going transform it into this bird in flight here. And we'll do so using the Puppet Warp command. But, before we go there, we need to extract the bird from its background. Which is frequently the case when you're working with Puppet Warp. So, let me show you how that works. Now, a lot of the work I've done for you in advance. I've drawn this intensely complicated path outline that we'll use to select the bird. And now I will show you how the extraction works because not only do we need to move the bird on to its own independent layer but we need to get rid of the bird in the sky background.

So I will go and switch over to the base image file and the first thing that we want to do is copy this image to a new layer by pressing Ctrl Alt J command option J on the Mac and lets just go ahead and call this layer original. And then click OK. Now switch over to the paths panel, and click on this path outline to make it active, and then you can switch back to the layers panel. And rather than clicking on the add layermask icon, go ahead and press the control key, or the command key on the Mac and click. And that will convert that path outline into a vector mask for this new layer. Alright now you can turn it off, we'll get back to it in a moment. Now lets get rid of the bird in the original background here. And I'll do that, by switching to the Lasso tool, which of course you can get by pressing the L key.

And then I'll press and hold the Alt key, or the Option key on a Mac, and click around the perimeter of the animal like so, until I've selected obviously too much. I'm giving myself a lot of wiggle room, outside of the bird. But once you arrive at a selection outline that looks more or less like that. Then go up to the edit menu, and choose the fill command, or you can press Shift-backspace on the PC, or Shift-delete on a (Mac), and change the use option right here to content aware, and then, make sure your blending options are set to their defaults, as they are in my case, and click OK, in order to fill in this selected region, with a bunch of content aware stuff that Photoshop is finding outside the selection Alright, now press Control D, or Command D on a Mac, in order to deselect the image. Obviously Photoshop didn't do exactly a perfect job, we can see seams all over the place, but you can heal away a lot of that by switching to the Standard Healing Brush and then Alt click, or Option click in this transitional area right there, and maybe paint over around here.

And then, Alt or Option click down below in the blue area, and paint along this line like so. And do whatever it takes to just generally fill in this area. Now it's unlikely without an awful lot of work that you're going to do a perfect job of it, that you're not going to be able to see some sort of seam, or smudge, or something going on. And so here's the quick and dirty way to solve that problem. We've got very low focus going on, as you can see here. So why not just blur the image by going up to the Filter menu, choosing Blur.

And choosing Gaussian Blur. Or if you loaded D keys, you have that shortcut of Shift F6. And then crank the radius value where this image is concerned, up to 50 pixels, five zero. And then click Okay, in order to accept that change. And we have this nice smooth sky. All right now press the M key to switch back to the rectangular marquee tool and I'll turn on the original layer and just like that we've got our falcon extracted from the sky and the background. Both separate elements so that we can edit them independently, using Puppet Warp, as I'll explain in the next movie.