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Advanced Cutout Techniques: Learn THE professional method for cutting out pictures
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Posted on July 22nd, 2005
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Adobe Photoshop
-|- Intro:
There are many ways of selecting an image to cut it out of its background. The most popular methods of doing this are, of course, the fastest ways, the Magnetic Lasso or the Magic Wand Tool. While these tools are quite quick and efficient, they do have some drawbacks, specifically the lack of control over ones actions and a sometimes very large margin of error. This tutorial will teach you a much more effective method of cutting images away from their backgrounds. The method described in the next few pages is, while very time consuming, well worth the wait as it produces the highest quality cutouts and gives the user (the cutter-outer, if you will :P) a significantly higher level of control over what he/she is selecting.


-|- Requirements:

-|- Adobe Photoshop (preferably 7.0 or Higher) and a very basic knowledge of the program (though not much experience is necessary).
-|- Patience and the will to produce better cutouts than a simple magic wand chop.

I am using the Mac version of Photoshop CS, any differences in versions and/or operating systems shouldn�t be significant, but feel free to ask questions if you have any problems.


-|- The Tutorial:


-|- Open Photoshop and the image you want to cut out. For this tutorial I will be using this one by Eric Lofgren :

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-|- First, select the Freeform Pen tool and make sure your settings match these:

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-|- Draw a line around your image following the general contours of what you want to cut out. This part does not need to be accurate at all, it is just to give us a starting point.

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-|- Now, using the Direct Selection tool (see image below), click on the path made by the pen tool to select it. You should see boxes, anchor points, all along your path now.

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-|- In the toolbar now, click and hold on the pen button to bring up the different options of the pen tool, and select the Add Anchor Points tool.

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-|- Now, you will be able to click on the little boxes you brought up when you selected the path.

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-|- Each of these boxes is an anchor point. The path of the pen tool flows from anchor point to anchor point, editing and moving these anchor points will allow you to adjust the path created by the pen tool.

-|- Zoom in quite far (about 400-700% depending on the size of the image) so you can see the details of the edges you want to cut along. With your Add Anchor Point tool, begin selecting anchor points and moving them around to fit the path to the edges of your image.

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-|- To adjust the curves between anchor points, select an anchor point and you will see two straight lines protruding from it. Dragging the ends of these lines adjusts the degree and length of the curve between the anchor point you have selected and the one next to it.

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-|- Once you have selected the image in its entirety (remember, this will be a long process, do not expect a quick job) zoom back out, and hit Command + Return (Ctrl + Return on PC). This will turn your path that you have toiled and worked so very hard on into a selection. This selection works just like any other selection.

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-|- Feel free to cut out the image as you please now, I like to use the Command + J, which simply copies the selection to a new layer and you don�t lose the original one. Depending on how much time you spent and how accurate you were (it takes a bit of practice to get good at it, but again, its worth it). You will have a very clean cutout of your image.

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-|- Some Tips:

-|- What to do with too many anchor points

-|- One common occurrence where you can have too many anchor points is going around large curves, such as in the picture below.

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-|- As a general rule, it is easier to select large, smooth curves, using fewer anchor points, and simply adjusting the angles of the curves. To delete anchor points simply click on your Add Anchor Points tool and hold to bring up the options for the pen tool, and select the Delete Anchor Points tool.

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-|- This tool will delete anchor points when you click on them, but the curves in the new connected anchor points will also adjust themselves to compensate for the missing anchor point and may go somewhat wild. If this happens, stay calm, you can either continue deleting anchor points until it corrects itself, or simply zoom out and adjust the curves as was shown earlier in this tutorial.

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-|- Large Gaps

-|- When you are working on your selection and you come across a large gap where you need to do major transformations on a section of your image, for example, the space from the top of the sword to the warriors shoulder here was skipped over in my initial drawing of the path and now needs to be selected.

user posted image


-|- To fix this it is much easier to create an anchor point in the middle of the gap, and drag it all the way to the bottom (see image) and then put more anchor points on the sides of that to complete the gap.

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-|- Small Dips

-|- An easy way to deal with small dips in your image (such as the one in the image below) is to create two anchor points, one on each side of the dip, and another in the middle.

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-|- Dragging the middle anchor point down into the bottom of the dip will sufficiently cover that area.

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-|- Closing:

I hope this tutorial did as much for you as this technique has for me. It is a hugely useful one when you actually decide to take the time to make a good cut out. Understand that this is not for simply cutting images out for sigs, but can also be used for any type of image blending/combining. Anyone who works with piecing together images (or professional sig artist :P) will tell you that a clean cutout is essential for a good image. Hopefully this tutorial provided you with a good new way to make cleaner, more professional cutouts.

Thank you for reading!



-|- End


**Credit goes to Eric Lofgren and Paradigm Concepts for the image used in this tutorial.
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