Advanced Matting Techniques?

[Silent Strife]

Just looking for a matting techniques to get better results separating people from their backgrounds. I've mostly used the pentool->convert to selection. But I'm looking to be dead on balls accurate. Thanks.

[Sage]

search EXTRACTION

[Hannu Hurme]

There's no one true way to do it. Personally I simply use the magnetic lasso as it seems to be somewhat more accurate than the magnetic pen. Then I create a mask based on that, and do the rest with hard or soft brushes of varying opacities. Especially hair can be difficult as you probably know. Sometimes I go as far as masking individual hairs one by one.

The extract tool works sometimes, but usually I don't bother with it.

[pellepiano]

With onecolored backgrounds you can use Color Range to get a basic selection that can be used as a layer mask for further tweaks.

Extract Tool can be a good start also ( sometimes to wonders with hair ).

Using a channel with the highest contrast as the basis for a layer mask is also good ( perhaps the best technique ).

Ostrich on this image was done useing a layer mask and Dodge and Burn.

http://www.pellepiano.com/studiobild/images/imagee4.jpg