Combining hi-con mattes and traditional tools for complex cut-outs

1) First, switch to the Channels palette and identify which channel gives the best contrast between the complex area you want to cut out and the background. Simply click on the individual channels to see what they look like.

You will often have problems with fine strands of hair. So this is what you should look for, and what we will work on in this tutorial.

Don't worry about the rest of the image, just concentrate on the contrast between hair and background.

2) With the "contrast channel" identified, drag it down to the "New Channel" icon to create a copy.

Rename this layer if you wish. It will help to give it a simple and recognisable name, especially when dealing with difficult footage.

3) We now want to maximise the contrast on this channel to separate background and foreground.

We could use several of the colour correction tools, but we'll start with a simple Levels command. Image > Adjustments > Levels.

4) Increase the contrast by moving the Input Black & Input White arrows inwards.

Again, you don't need to get it perfect at this stage, but it is important to get a decent contrast between the edges of the hair and background.

5) By now, you should have a pretty decent hi-con (high contrast) matte. Now grab your brush tool and paint in the imperfections.

Decide how detailed you want to get with this. With some images you can pretty much finish the entire cutout at this stage. If there are still some edges that are too tricky/time-consuming with the brush we'll deal with them in the next section.

Paint out all the areas that you don't want - it doesn't matter too much if you leave in patchy areas of areas you want, so long as you include them in the masking process in the next part.

6) If you have the area that you want to keep in white and the area you want to remove in black, then move straight on.

If your hi-con matte has the area you want to keep in black, then you'll have to invert it. Image > Adjustments > Invert.

7) Click on RGB in the Channels palette and then come back to the Layers palette.

You can now use your favoured method to cut out any areas that you haven't managed to to get with the hi-con matte. This could either be the Pen tool, Lasso tool, Marquee tool or a combination of all three.

Once you have the main bulk as a selection, you can add the complex hair area.

8) Switch back to the Channels palette. If you Apple/Ctrl select any channel you will load it as a selection.

Here we already have a selection, so we want to add our Hair channel to it. Hold down Apple/Ctrl-Shift and click on the hair channel. This will combine the two selections to make a great cut-out.

9) Back in the Layers palette, click on the Add Layer Mask icon to turn the selection into a mask. Note: If you are working on a locked Background layer, you will have to double-click/duplicate it to allow you to create a layer mask.

10) That's it. You can now drag this layer into another image, or adjust the layer mask by painting more or adding a filter.