September 2009
Beginner
640 pages
26h 48m
English
Content preview from Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing ManualBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Removing Objects from an Image's Background
Ever feel the urge to pluck an object out of your photo's background? For example, maybe you want to take an amazing shot you got of the moon and stick it in another photo. The traditional procedure is to make your selection, invert it (Inverting a Selection), and then delete the rest of the image. But Elements streamlines this process with another "magic" tool—the Magic Extractor. It works much like the Quick Selection tool in that you just give Elements a few hints and let it do the rest. When the Magic Extractor's done, your selection is isolated in all its lonely glory, surrounded by transparency and ready for use on its own. Like the Quick Selection tool, this tool does a surprisingly good job—most of the time. To conduct your own experiments, download the practice photo (figurine.jpg) from the Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com.
Tip
You may find it faster to use the Quick Selection tool (Selecting with a Brush), followed by inverting and deleting the background area as explained on Inverting a Selection. If that doesn't work, then it's time to try the Magic Extractor.
The Magic Extractor has an elaborate dialog box with tools found nowhere else in Elements. To see it, go to Image → Magic Extractor (see Figure 5-14). You see a full-screen dialog box that includes a toolbox on the left side, instructions across the top, a preview of your image, and a set of controls at right. It looks complicated, but it's really just a bunch of ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.