Photoshop advice needed

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Actually I am using the gimp , but I am told that they are similar enough.

the problem is this

I took a family photo and want to separate the sib in question from the rest of the photo. Using the gimp I was able to separate the sib and pasted it to a separate image, probably cloned it. The problem then becomes that I have an image thats surrounded by a sea of white.

The picture is about 3 and half inches in width and about seven inches in height. This being surrounded by a border of white thats about two inches all around.

Can anyone give me some advice on how to reduce that white border to nothing ?

Declan

2

I could probably help you, but I’m not quite sure what you are asking. Could you clarify a bit? For example, you said you wanted to seperate the ‘sib in question.’ I assume you mean sibilingm but I’m not 100% sure on that. Then you mention something about a sea of white and trying to get rid of a boarder.

Could you post the picture somewhere so I could take a look at it? I could probably help you quite a bit more if I could see what you are talking about.
Or if you’d like you could email it to me and I could attempt to work on it myself.

3

I don’t use GIMP, so there may be some translation problems.

What you want to do is create a layer mask for your sibling layer. (This may be called an “alpha channel.”)

Oh wait, here’s a basic tutorial that will tell you what you need to do.

Just mask out the white parts. This is non-destructive editing, so if you erase a bit of your sibling, you can switch colours and paint it back it.

4

Sorry, this may be a more useful page for using layer masks in GIMP.

5

Take the original picture you’re cutting the sibling from and look at the individual channels. Red, blue or green (or CMYK). Individual channels are viewed in greyscale. Look for the one with the highest contrast between the figure and the background. Duplicate that one. Then, on the duplicate, adjust the levels to a very high contrast. Clean up the rest with the paintbrush. (This is non-destructive and repeatable from scratch if you mess up.)
The resulting channel can be loaded as a selection. That selection can then be used to cut-and-paste, or, better yet, it can become a layer mask as mentioned above by Larry Mudd.

6

Were this Photoshop, the easiest way I would do this would be:

  • Select the magic wand (this selects a region based on color)
  • Reduce tolerance to 0 (determines how “fuzzy” the selection will be in including similar colors in its selection; 0 means select only that which matches that specific color)
  • Select the “sea of white” (may require multiple shift-clicks if the “sea of white” is not contiguous or uniform in color)
  • Inverse selection so that everything that is not the sea of white is selected
  • Cut and paste into new image
  • If necessary, select new paste object and defringe 1-3 pixels to remove the leftover white fringe

This isn’t perfect but it’s a good quick 'n dirty method. Your GIMP mileage may vary.