The first series of shots I took of Camellia, before I started the doll adventure, were of her escaping the ball. I love the idea of her in bare feet with her skirt lifted up fleeing down some marble steps.
Here’s the shot I took of her:
Like so many of my early shots, I end up with a shot I love on a background that’s very difficult to remove. My early shots all have tiny bits of red mixed in their hair and around the edges of their dresses.
Because I hadn’t really taken the time to learn Photoshop before, I used some combination of selecting, pasting, blurring, etc to remove the image I wanted from the bright red background.
This weekend, I took the lesson on selecting and masking, and I finally have an image where Camellia isn’t shrouded in red.
Camellia escapes the ball. Follow her story at www.mydolladventure.com
The select and mask tools themselves are 90% of the solution. Between the select tool, for getting the big pieces, and then the refine tool that you can use to refine the selection, most of the red is easily removed. But, even after I’d removed all of the visible red, as soon as I put the background behind it, I could still see a tiny halo of red all around her.
If you see this after you’ve used select and mask, choose “decomtaminate colors” and output to a new layer. This strips out I the last little bits of red.
I still had to tinker with her dress and legs, because the red backdrop had put a red tint on these objects. I adjusted the hue on those pieces and, even though her legs looks a little ghostly, they’re good enough for me.
And that’s Camellia escaping from the ball.
Making Comics has a terrific section on expression and gestures, but I feel like that’s learning for some future episode, and my Photoshop book is about to do a lesson on text. So, for Wednesday, I’ll show the results of getting the wrinkles of out my backdrop, and hopefully I’ll also have completed the front of the hut by then.