Here is a very easy and useful technique to make selections using the color channels palet in photoshop.
The channel palet can be scary to new users to photoshop but it doesn't have to be. Once you master some of the basic techniques like I'll show in this tutorial you will see that it can be a very friendly and usefull tool.
Step 1:
click on channels and select the channel that gives the most difference between your subject and the background. In this case it will be the blue channel.
Step 2:
Make a copy of that channel. You dont want to mess around with the original channels so always make a copy or new channel if you are going to do any changes.
Step 3:
Now in order to make an even bigger difference between the white back ground and what we want to select we will want to darken it using levels. Bring the levels down and adjust them until you have most of the outer area darkened.
We are trying to make what we want selected as dark as possible and what we dont want to select as light as possible.
Step 4:
Using your paintbrush paint in the middle area with black.
Step 5:
Now that you have everything black and white we will want to make a selection.
holding the CTRL key down, click on the new channel.
Step 6:
Now if you click back on the RGB channel you will see that chris hansen has been selected very clearly.
Step 7:
You will need to inverse the selection by pressing "CTRL + SHIFT + I" in order to inverse the selection and have only Chris Selected.
Now to test our selection and see how clean it is. We dont want any white junk around the edges. So for this test, I created a black background to place him on so that any white would show very clearly.
as you can see, it is a fairly good selection with only a tiny bit of white around the edges.
now I'll show you a trick to use to clean that up too.
Going into the layer effects options on your layer, select "inner shadow" then adjust it to remove the white edges. This is like a drop shadow but in reverse so it darkens the very edge of the layer and helps to minimize any flaws in the selection cut out.
As you can see, we are able to cleanly select an image off a white background with out using any select tools and with very minimum amounts of edging.
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