How to create natural looking flowers

[bozena]

I often wonder how do you extract the flowers from the pictures to get them look so real and to get perfectly clean edges? I have a lot of pictures of flowers from my garden and would like to use them in my LO. I'm PSE 6.0 user and wondering if I could do that.

[elenasworld]

I am not sure how everyone else does it, but for the few leaves I have extracted, I use my Macro feature on the camera. That gets a good closeup and the rest of the background is somewhat blurry. That helps me out, since extracting is not my favorite thing to do.

I use the lasso tool too in conjunction with the magic wand to get a pretty close selection of what I want. Since I am not good with the eraser tool, I generally contract my selection by a few pixels to get rid of any little bits I missed.

I am sure other people have their favorite methods too. I use PhotoshopCS2

[Victoria32]

What really helps is to have clean crisp edges on the part of the photo you want to extract. I use the lasso tool and eraser in combination with a mask sometimes. You can also try the Magic Extractor which is part of the Image tool menu. Try and crop as close to the part you want, and then try that. It sometimes does a great job if the areas are well defined.
I am using PSE 4 and think the tools are better in PSE 6. I'm waiting for PSE 7 to be released and then am upgrading to that.

[j_camargo6]

One trick that I've found really handy, is to apply the stroke to the object to check on stray pixels, too. Makes them easy to find to erase and make the object really clean....although you have to REMEMBER to do it. OH and REMEMBER to "unapply" it when you're done, before you save LOL!

Good luck!

[bozena]

Thank you all, for the great tips. I'll be trying all. Let you know how it goes.

[ABitDaffy]

You've received some great advice so far. Here would be my tip, if you don't mind re-shooting your photos.

Pick the flower and then take a picture of it against a contrasting-colored background. So, if your flower is a beautiful, bright pink, take a picture of it against a white background or if it's a soft, light color, take a picture of it against a black background. Like Liz said, use the macro setting on your camera if you have one and try the best you can not to use the flash (that way you won't have strange lighting on the extracted flower and you can create your own light source once you get it extracted onto your layout).


That's my 2-cents