Masking Unmanageable Hair

Also in This Edition

• A1 II's 199 MP image vs. Samsung S23 Ultra's 200MP image
• Kenya Photo Safari II is open for registration!
• The usual announcements
• Viewer Mail
• Geeking with Gary - EV charging networks are the wrong idea

Creating Photoshop masks for highly detailed objects has always been a challenge.  In the past I had a few techniques that worked pretty well, but if your goal is to add a dark background behind your subject the shortcomings of those techniques start to show.

Very quickly, here are the techniques I've used and their strengths and weaknesses:

Technique #1: Select Subject

Photoshop has had a machine-learning tool called "Select Subject" for quite awhile now, and frankly it does an pretty good job most of the time.  But can it handle difficult subjects with frizzy hair like this one?  To invoke it, just do a SELECT --> SUBJECT and wait a little bit while it analyzes the image and makes its best guess.   (As always, click on any image to view larger and sharper.)

Meet Viva Wittman; Actor, Writer, Musician

Now copy that selection to its own layer and put a neutral backdrop behind it:

Not bad if you don't look too closely.  It missed quite a bit of the hair, especially in the lower right quadrant.  And strands of hair in the upper-right corner simply disappear in mid-air.  Now let's put in a dark background and see what other defects turn up:

Yuk!  Look at all those halos around the hair detail!!  This won't do.

Technique #2: Select and Mask

It is problems like this that the Select and Mask function was invented, to refine selections when it comes to fuzzy edges.  To use, after your "Select Subject" has been made, do a SELECT --> SELECT AND MASK...  The following screen shows up:

Using the Refine Edge Brush Tool (2nd brush on the left side), all you have to do is brush over the fine details that the "Select Subject" function missed.  You don't even have to do a super-detailed job; just a sloppy wide brush over the area that needs cleanup is all you need.

Well, the missing hair in the bottom right quadrant and the full length of the hair in the top right are back; but those halos are still pretty bad against a dark background.  Any tricks to getting rid of those?

Technique #3: Shrink Selection

Another popular remedy is to slightly shrink the selection (hopefully eliminating the halo) using the SELECT --> MODIFY --> CONTRACT SELECTION.  With this picture it didn't make a very big difference:

Nuts to this!  Let's try a completely different approach - one that's worked for me for 20 years:

Technique #4: The Magic Wand Tool

The Magic Wand tool tells photoshop "See this color I've clicked on?  Select all other pixels in the image with the same color".  Because the background color isn't uniform, you can also specify a tolerance level along the top bar.  In this case I used a tolerance of 30 and clicked in about 5 different places to select all of the background.  (I had to clean it up a little, manually erasing the background poles and other distractions.).  After selecting the white background, I then did a "Select Inverse":

The "marching ants" show what's currently being selected.

This was the result using a neutral background: 

Pretty good!  Now for the acid test: The darker background:

It even shows the effect of the hair light I used!

Huzzah!  

Not all techniques work on all images; so each shot often requires a different approach.  (See the image below.)  And, this being Photoshop, there are about a zillion other techniques that might also work for this scenario.  

Same background as the original.  For this shot, "Select
Subject" followed by "Select and Mask" did the trick.  

Kenya Photo Safari II Open for Registration!!

Well, you've been hearing me talk about last November's Photo Safari in Kenya, and how it was so amazing that many wanted to do it again!  And so I've put together (along with Gamewatchers Safaris who hosted us the first time) a slightly different itenerary which promises an equally amazing experience.  Below is the link to the all the details.  8 days / 7 nights, USD $5,396 per person based on double occupancy.  This time I'm bringing a monopod. :-)

https://friedmanarchives.com/safari 

Not much room for this event so if you're even thinking of joining us either contact me with questions or sign up on the website ASAP!

Seminars!

The next Friedman Archives High-Impact Photography Seminar will be held in San Jose, California the weekend of April 26-27th.  We'll also be conducting the optional Wireless Flash workshop Sunday evening for those of you who want to get your feet wet with this very important technique.  Signup early at https://www.friedmanarchives.com/seminars/sanjose !

We are also planning to return to Manchester, UK in the fall of 2026.  Email me (Gary at Friedman Archives dot com) to be put on a notification list.  Or if your photo club would like to sponsor a seminar in your area.

New Zoom Talk Available

Many of you are aware that I've been giving remote Zoom lectures to photo clubs around the world ever since the pandemic, and I have to say these are almost as enjoyable as giving a seminar in-person. :-)  

So I'm constantly expanding my repitoire.  The newest talk that had people buzzing was "The Quick Fix", showing how the new breed of AI tools can repair photo problems that even Photoshop can't touch.  

Book me today for your upcoming online club meeting!  A full list of topics can be found here.

In the Pipeline

My Sony A1 II finally arrived a few days ago, so I've got my head down and putting that camera through its paces.  (See photo in a couple of sections.)  You can still pre-order the ebook now at a discount at FriedmanArchives.com/a1ii

A7 IV Update - Sony has come out with Firmware Version 5 of the A7 IV, which adds only one feature of note: Support for Sony’s Camera Authenticity Solution (which I patented back in the 1990's).  It requires the purchase of a software license that few people can actually buy - it's reserved for photojournalists and other media professionals.  It's been a long time coming but I'm not going to write a supplement for it until I get an evaluation license from Sony and I can put it through its paces and write up a good user guide which sets expectations properly.  Try as I might I can't get such an evaluation license from Sony.  (Even though my name is on the patent. :-( )  So you're all on your own.

Real Email from Real Readers

Hi Gary,

I’m a long time reader of yours, and I think I’ve bought just about every Sony book you’ve written. Great stuff!!

Here’s an idea for a project, which I think is the sort of thing you do really well. ( I remember the neat comparison you did of a photo taken by an RX100 compared to a full frame Sony…)

Virtually every Leica review I’ve ever read waxes rhapsodic about the so-called ‘Leica look’. Well, I’ve often wondered if that’s a real effect, or merely the result of the particular photo they’re looking at, or perhaps it’s projecting their reverence (envy?) for the brand onto the photo. Whatever.

So, how about doing a similar blind comparison of photos of the same scene taken at the same time, with a Q3, Q43, M11, A7Cr, X100VI, and so on. All images unprocessed jpeg’s, no film simulations, etc. Have a number of photographers try to identify which came from which camera. And, once and for all, determine if the Leica Look is real, or imaginary.  Waddya think?

Cheers, Martin Step

Kitchener, Ontario

===

Hi, Martin!

Excellent question!  I'll answer it with a story.  A National Geographic photographer I know said that back in the days of film, there was a Leica club at the magazine who took great pride in looking at their transparencies (usually Kodachrome 25 or 64) with a loupe and basked in the "Leica Look" that only their cameras could generate.  It was a real thing.  But printing was the great equalizer; since the printed page has a much narrower dynamic range, any difference in quality between Leica and other high-end camera brands evaporated.  You couldn't examine a printed magazine and deduce what kind of a camera or lens produced it.

Today, however, the other camera companies have caught up with Leica in terms of lens design and multi-coating.  The "leica look" is no longer a thing but confirmation bias and reputation persists among high-falutin' photographers.  It's like audiophiles who insist that monster cables can make their vinyl albums sound better.  Let them bask in their expensive choices and feel good about themselves. :-)

So, given that printing will make my smartphone look as good as my Sony A7R V (see this blog post), the results of a similar exercise would be a foregone conclusion.  Why go to all the trouble and expense of taking similar shots and enlarging them when you know what the outcome will be based on prior experience?  (And I just KNOW that if I did that my readers would insist on pixel-peeping the original RAW files and point out the differences...)

Does this help? :-)

[Cue the hate mail in 3...2...1...]

199 MP A1 II images vs. 200 MP from Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra

Here's a quickie.  My A1 II arrived a few days ago, and so I thought I'd use it to take this high-res image of the downtown Boston skyline.  I did it using the camera's pixel-shift feature, which yielded a 199 MP image before cropping.  Wow!  

Just for fun I thought I'd take the same image using my Samsung S23 Ultra's 200 MP sensor, which I've written about before.  

Not bad if all you're doing is posting to Instagram.  Now let's look at 100% crops of each:

A1 II 100% Crop

Samsung S23 Ultra 200MP sensor - 100% crop

The moral of the story: Know the limitations of your tools!  While the Samsung's sensor does really well in good light, low light is a different story. :-)  

Geeking with Gary - We're Charging our EVs Wrong(ly)

Sony didn't ask me if there was a better way to implement focus bracketing.  (See Update #2 in this blog post.)  The FBI didn't ask me if there was a better way to do encryption (which allowed for legitimate law enforcement decryption without the use of back doors).  And nobody has asked me if we're taking the wrong approach when it comes to building out electric vehicle charging stations.

Rather than spending billions of dollars building out fast-charging network infrastructure, we should handle EV batteries the same way we handle propane tank exchanges - pull into a service station, quickly swap out the battery (which has been designed for easy replacement) with one that had been trickle charging overnight, and be on your way in less than 5 minutes (instead of the 30 minutes it takes now). No new infrasturcture necessary; as you can use existing gas stations (which can still serve gas).  If the battery loses its effectiveness over time, just take it out of circulation (just like we do with propane tanks).  The icing on the cake is that there's no $15K cost to replace the lithium-ion batteries once they wear out.  

Usually when I think of an idea, I'll do some research and discover that someone else has already thought of it.  (Inventors know this scenario well.)  One of the Kenya participants told me that in 2008 there was a company that had envisioned just that, and had even drawn up battery size and swapping specifications and had set up swapping stations in a few different countries!  Regretfully they went out of business in 2013, proving once again that there's no correlation between good ideas and ideas that succeed in the free market.

Until next time,

Yours Truly, Gary Friedman

"Creator of the densest blog posts on the planet" ™