Tutorial: AKVIS SmartMask

Little Princess

The author of the tutorial is Gordon Sisson. He worked in Adobe Photoshop CS3.

It very often needs to extract a figure from a busy or messy background and it is usually a tedious, exacting and time-consuming process. The author was therefore anxious to test AKVIS SmartMask and share his impressions.

This is a snapshot of the daughter of Mr. Sisson's friend. The little girl looks very pretty and is well posed but the background is terribly distracting.

Original photo

First the picture was scanned at high resolution to facilitate enlargement. Then Gordon Sisson rotated the picture so that the figure was more naturally vertical and cropped it. Then he called up AKVIS Enhancer to improve shadow detail so that he could see the hair edge that was lost against the background of the woman’s dress.

• Step 1. Open the image in the photo editor. Select Layer -> Duplicate Layer from the menu to make a copy of the layer and start the AKVIS SmartMask plug-in by clicking on Filter -> AKVIS -> SmartMask.
  
  Image in Adobe Photoshop
• Step 2. Use the blue pencil (Keep Aree Pencil) to draw an outline within the image. The author took extra care with this line (possibly unnecesarily) because the background was, in places, so similar to the image he was extracting. If you are not completely satisfied with any part of the line, simply select the Eraser and proceed to correct your move.

  Then use the red pencil (Drop Area Pencil) to outline the background.

  
  Pencil strokes in Sharp mode
• Step 3. Press the button to start processing the image. Press Show Strokes to turn off drawn lines. Press Show Transparent Background for transparency.
  
  Image on transparent background
• Step 4. Press the Soft button to move into a more detailed processing of finer edges like hair.

  Select the green pencil (Transition Area Pencil) and increase the Brush Size. Use the scaling slider to make the little girl’s head as large as possible. Paint over the edge of the hair.

  
  Working in Soft mode
• Step 5. Press the button to start processing the image. Then press to apply the SmartMask miracle!
  
  Processing result
• Step 6. Work is nearly finished, but now Mr. Sisson is unhappy with the pose. Originally, the girl's hand was resting on the sofa arm, now it is just floating. So he repositioned the arm for a better pose.

  Then, a quick cleanup with AKVIS Noise Buster (this also improves skin tones). Tune up some of the edges and we are ready to make a final portrait. Place the image on a new background, fine tune edges as needed, sharpen a bit and here is what we get for our enjoyable first trip with AKVIS SmartMask!

  
  Image on a new background