Painting the Web

Knockouts and Extractions

I called them cut-outs, but other people refer to them as knockouts—extracting a subject or group of subjects from the rest of a photograph. The reasons to create knockouts are as varied as their uses. Maybe the background is too distracting or you want to add an overlap effect. Perhaps you want to create a knockout for humor, or to create an odd image to catch your web page viewer's attention. I have a friend who uses flower knockouts, deliberately sizing the photo so that the flower overlaps a given frame.

Isolating a subject from the rest of a photograph can be easy if the subject is all smooth curves and the background is a solid color. All you need to do then is tap the subject with the Magic Wand tool (or equivalent) and cut. Anything else, though, is going to take more work.

One approach to free-form selections of an image based on color is to use Photoshop's built-in Color Range tool, which can be accessed via Select → Color Range. The tool provides eyedroppers for removing or adding colors to the final selection, as shown in Figure 3-25 with several colors added to the selection.

Figure 3-25. Using the Color Range to select the subject

After selecting all of the colors to be masked, either you can cut away the background or, by right-clicking the selected area and choosing Select Inverse from the menu, you can select the subject, which can then be copied ...