Magic Extractor

Elements 4.0 makes creating collages a piece of cake

This week I've had the extreme pleasure of reviewing Photoshop Elements 4.0 for Macworld Magazine. I shall not spoil the review for you here (look for a link in the coming days) but let me just say that Adobe has pulled out all the stops and added some fantastic features to Elements.

Ah yes, the good sistership has added some new tools, enhanced the Quick Fix mode, added Bridge from CS2, and on and on. All for a mere $89 for the CD, and $79 for the download ($69/$59 upgrade). Arguably, this outrageously affordable piece of software was rockin' at version 3.0; so, how can I be going on and on about version 4.0? Two words: Magic Extractor.

Tonight I'm going to take you through the steps of removing an object (in our case a very big dog) from its background and plunking into another photo. It's a gloriously simple process and with it you can create some really fun collages. Let's get started!

Choose your photos!

The first thing you want to do is pick the photos you want to combine. I've chosen a photo from a canoe trip this past summer that I want to add the family dog to. Since my husband and I don't have a dog, I bought one from iStockphoto.com. Everyone, meet Snowball; Snowball this is everyone.

Step 1: Pop open your photos in Elements, with Snowball's photo in front.

Step 2: Proceed immediately to the Image menu and choose Magic Extractor.

Step 3: In the resulting large dialog box, mark the area you want to keep with the Foreground brush tool (circled below in red and the marks are shown in red). Then grab the Background brush tool (directly beneath it), and mark the background area (those marks shown in blue). As you can see here, I've just scribbled some lines atop Snowball.

TIP: As with most automated selection tools, the more contrast you have between the object you're selecting and the background, the better the results. If you have areas of color in the foreground object that are similar to the background, you'll want to mark those, like I've done above. It's a trial and error thing, really.

Step 4: When you're finished scribbling, click Preview and see where you're at. You'll most likely have a little tweaking to do, just as we do below.

Step 5: Luckily, Adobe has included several tools right here in the Magic Extractor dialog box for clean-up. No need to go elsewhere for the aforementioned tweaking. To erase a bit more of the background, just select the Remove from Selection tool and erase those areas (both the tool and the area I erased are circled in red below).

Step 6: If you erase too much, select the Add to Selection tool and paint that area back in; like Snowball's ear.

Step 7: To smooth the edges, select the (can you guess?) Smoothing Brush. Just position the brush on top of the edge and it'll smooth as you drag.

TIP: To zoom in just click the magnifying glass in beneath the Smoothing Brush tool. To zoom back out, press and hold Option as you click. To move around while zoomed in, press and hold the spacebar until the cursor turns into a little hand.

When satisfied, press OK. Not bad, eh?

Step 8: With our newly extracted Snowball visible along with the Photo Bin at the bottom of our screen, simply drag and drop Snowball onto the thumbnail of the photo you wish to plop her into, as shown below.

Step 9: Immediately resize Snowball by holding down the Shift key while dragging in and down on the top left handle, as shown below.

Step 10: Now that we've got Snowball sized (somewhat) appropriately, we need to make her coloration match the rest of the photo. To do that we'll create an adjustment layer but first we must Command (PC: Ctrl) click on the layer thumbnail to select just her, lest the rest of the photo be affected.

Step 11: Click the half black/half white circle to create an adjustment layer and choose Levels.

Step 12: In the Levels dialog box, adjust the sliders at will. My goal was to get the coloration of Snowball to look a bit more like that of the overall photo. Once you're satisfied, click OK.

And here's Snowball with her new happy family:

The color isn't perfect and it doesn't look 100% real, but then again, that can be the really fun part of creating a collage.

Now that you know how easy Elements makes this type of project, I hope you'll try some of your own. See you next time!