Best way to smooth edges

Lets say I have a picture of a person and I want to extract him from the background;
I have tried using the various tools (magic wand, magic selector, etc) and I am getting better.
But, there is always a lot of fine tuning I have to do to get a sharp edge of the subject as none of the tool cleanly and crisply extyract the person all of the time (at least with my simplistic understanding of PSE).
I remember seeing a technique of taking an extracted image and then cutting off a few pixels around all the edges thus giving a smooth extraction (the edges are all sharp).
Can you all provide me with your technique that I promise I will save so I dont have to re-ask you the same stupid question.
Also, I have been all over the net looking for sites that provide good videos for tutorials. (the written read tutorials althoug are good, are not as easy to understand than a good video showing mouse movements etc).

Paradoxically, when extracting people from backgrounds, a sharp edge is exactly what you do not want. For the extracted person to blend into the new background, you want to 'feather' the selection. Here's one workflow:
-- Copy your original image to a new layer and do all the subsequent operations on the copy
-- Use whatever tools you want to make the selection (the selection brush in Elements is great for fine tuning -- its almost the equivalent of the quick-mask tool in Photoshop). Save the selection in case you have to restart (Select>Save)
-- Go to Select>Modify>Contract and enter a low number in the pixels field (1 is a good place to start)
-- Go to Select>Feather and enter a low number (1 is a good place to start)
-- Press cntl-shift-i to invert the selection (you now have everything EXCEPT the person selected
-- Hit delete. You should now have just the person, with a feathered edge.
-- Put your new background on a layer below the layer with the person on it and Bob's your uncle (no, not me, some other, probably English, Bob)
Bob Warren

Similar Messages

Best way to make a short movie that can play back and forth smooth?

Hi!
I have a short .flv clip (video) of a shoe rotating 360 degrees.
The clip is less then 4 seconds and about 320kb in size and I'm using flash CS4.
I'm trying to build some sort of a player that lets the user scrub through the movie (back and forth).
The player is also supposed to be able to play the clip back or forth at a speed selected by the user.
I have read kglad's reply about "How to play backwards flv imported in timeline on flash cs3?", and the code works perfect, except that the video is not playing smooth when played backwards. I guess when playing normal, the next frames are by default buffered, but when playing backwards they are not...
Which is the best way of doing this?.
Maybe it has already been done? Has anyone heard about something similar?
Thanks in advance!

Hi!
Please find the file attached. I changed the file extension from .fla to .eps.
(I also added one with the extension .mpg)
Basically I just want to be able to rotate the shoe in either direction,
but then I also would like the user to be able to "spin" it.
Meaning that when the user turns the shoe around, the speed is recorded,
and when he releases the mousebutton, the shoe will continue to rotate at that speed.
Do you think it could work using video? Or do I have to use stillimages instead?
Your script worked, but the film doesn't playback smoothly..
Thanks in advance!

What is the best way to make skin uniform (not necessarily blurring it!)

Hi,
I have some photographs where the skin of the model's leg is not of uniform brighteness. Without blurring it, I have tried the clone stamp but it is very difficult to not introduce further variations in brightness.
What is the best way to make skin uniform in brightness (actually, the same color!)?
Thanks,
Juan Dent

I know EXACTLY what you mean. I was doing something exactly on those lines just yesterday.
It's not trivial, but it's doable.
For hard "spots", you can try the Spot Healing Brush first.
But here's a neat trick I sometimes use that can nicely increase the overall smoothness:
1. Select just the skin area.
2. Contract the selection a bit and feather the edge, just to make sure you don't mess up the edges.
3. Filter - Noise - Median, and adjust the radius to be fairly large. Watch the image to see the smoothness level.
4. Edit - Fade and knock back the effect, so that it's not perfect, but makes a subtle improvement.
Then, for gentle darkening lightening, try the Burn and Dodge Tools, set to a low Exposure level (and possibly with Airbrush Mode on). Work gently.
Cloning with low opacity can sometime help as well.
-Noel

What is the best way to reconcile and bulk upload user account and entitlement data for an offline resource?

What we think is the following:
Create a GTC resource, with flat file reconciliation and spml provisioning.
Edit the provisioning process to get it work disconnected, based on http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E27559_01/admin.1112/e27149/disconn_resources.htm#CHDDGGHD, we need to modify all SPML sending process tasks to be manual.
Create a disconnected resource from this resource in a sandbox.
In this case we do not need to develop custom codes, we only need to modify the provisioning process to be manual.
Any other solutions or best ways to do it?

Hi Gergely
The best way is to use OIM bulk load utility.
Using the Bulk Load Utility - 11g Release 2 (11.1.2) --> Loading Account Data
This is very easy and smooth.
Thanks & Regards
Shashidhar

What is the best way to organize music by artist with various artist...

What is the best way in iTunes 7 to organize my music by an artist who has several songs that have appearances by other artist? I now have about 400 Artist, in my artist list.
1-Most of them are by the same Artist but with people who appear on their album as a special guest. What is the best solution for this?
2-The same Artist appear on someone else's album what is the best solutions for this? I would like to have as few categories as possible.
When I have a track with 2 artist, how will iTunes handle both Artist or do I have to determine? If I choose 1 Artist, does this mean that when I search for the 2nd Artist that the track would not be found. Please help me. I want to fix my Library so I can back it up.

Do you mean the Artist and the Album
Artist fields?
There is the Artist field. This is for the
artist(s) doing the song.
There is the Album Artist field. This is for
who's album it is.
If there are featured artists on a song, I usually
take them out of the Artist field and put it
after the song title.
"Smooth" - Santana featuring Rob Thomas becomes
"Smooth featuring Rob Thomas" - Santana.
This way I don't end up with a bunch of different
artists showing up in the Artists column.
That wwas exactly what I was talking about.

(workflow question) - What is the best way to handle audio in a large Premiere project?

Hey all,
This might probably be suitable for any version of Premiere, but just in case, I use CS4 (Master Collection)
I am wrestling in my brain about the best way to handle audio in my project to cut down on the time I am working on it.
This project I just finished was a 10 minute video for a customer shot on miniDV (HVX-200) cut down from 3 hours of tape.
I edited my whole project down to what looked good, and then I decided I needed to clean up all the Audio using Soundbooth, So I had to go in clip by clip, using the Edit in SoundBooth --> Render and Replace method on every clip. I couldn't find a way to batch edit any audio in Soundbooth.
For every clip, I performed similar actions---
1) both tracks of audio were recorded with 2 different microphones (2 mono tracks), so I needed only audio from 1 track - I used SB to cut and paste the good track over the other track.
2) amplified the audio
3) cleaned up the background noise with the noise filter
I am sure there has to be a better workflow option than what I just did (going clip by clip), Can someone give me some advice on how best to handle audio in a situation like this?
Should I have just rendered out new audio for the whole tape I was using, and then edit from that?
Should I have rendered out the audio after I edited the clips into one long track and performed the actions I needed on it? or something entirely different? It was a very slow, tedious process.
Thanks,
Aza

Hi, Aza.
Given that my background is audio and I'm just coming into the brave new world of visual bits and bytes, I would second Hunt's recommendation regarding exporting the entire video's audio as one wav file, working on it, and then reimporting. I do this as one of the last stages, when I know I have the editing done, with an ear towards consistency from beginning to end.
One of the benefits of this approach is that you can manage all audio in the same context. For example, if you want to normalize, compress or limit your audio, doing it a clip at a time will make it difficult for you to match levels consistently or find a compression setting that works smoothly across the board. It's likely that there will instead be subtle or obvious differences between each clip you worked on.
When all your audio is in one file you can, for instance, look at the entire wave form, see that limiting to -6 db would trim off most of the unnecessary peaks, triim it down, and then normalize it all. You may still have to do some tweaking here and there, but it gets you much farther down the road, much more easily.Same goes for reverb, EQ or other effects where you want the same feel throughout the entire video.
Hope this helps,
Chris

What is the best way for a family to set up apple ID's and icloud?

My partner and I have separate apple id's and own a mac book, ipad, 2 iphones and apple tv. What's the best way to set it all up so we can access everything on each device? Can we merge our ID's into one and transfer all our payments? We just registered for icloud and used a new shared email address, but still have our separate apple ID's. We have separate email addresses, calendars and notes that we would prefer to keep separate. It's really just our itunes purchases, music and photos that we want to be able to share. Thanks in advance! Cheers, Nicky

They will be able to download everything that was bought with their Apple ID. If they all shared an ID then they switched to their own ID they won't be able to use any apps or music bought with another Apple ID. As I explained in my previous response. There is only one way to share apps and content across multiple Apple ID's and that is home share. So, NO there isn't a "Smooth" way to do it.

What's the best way to (re)install Logic Studio? Need Help.

I bought Logic Studio a few months ago and installed it on my new MacBook Pro 2.4Ghz with 2G Ram, 160G hard drive @ 7200 rpm. Being new to Logic, at install, I just put all 40+ gigs of content on the computer. After a while I considered putting the Apple Loops (roughly 12gigs) onto an external hard drive to save space on my computer, just to see if it would work, then consider moving more content over later. After doing this the Logic application couldn't find the Apple Loops, and I couldn't find a way to help it see the new path, so my Apple Loops were essentially rendered useless (since I had already deleted them from the computer). So I stopped right there, and haven't done anything else. Just worked with Logic without using Loops, which I have to say is still an incredible program.
What also seemed strange was this: In moving the Apple Loops, the available disk space on the computer didn't seem to change much. It went down a few gigs, but not the 12 or so I was expecting. Not sure why that is. It seems like Logic and all the content is actually taking up around 50 gigs or so on my computer (and the Apple Loops are supposedly gone or not available). What is that about?
Feeling like I had really fouled things up, I called Apple Care. They said that the content of Logic is stored in many places in the computer's libraries and system folders, but it was really confusing trying to locate all of it, because the info they sent was from Logic 7 and older versions of GarageBand. I guess Logic 8 is too new for them to have anything on it. There is no uninstall for Logic Studio. But they strongly recommended that I perform an Erase and Install, and then re-install all my software including Logic, and then assign the hard drive I wanted the content in. That would open up a lot of the computer's hard drive space, they said. It seemed like an extreme measure to take for such a small blunder, and I haven't tried it yet, but will if it's the best option.
If I do this, is running Logic content (i.e. Loops, Impulse Responses, Jam Packs, etc.) from an external hard drive (and the one I have to use is 5400rpm--is that too slow or am I getting too picky?) the best way to go, or should I have all Logic material coming from the same machine? How do I get some of my hard drive space back?
Ugh.
Has anyone out there experienced this too? Is there anything documented about where the content is stored for Logic Studio? Is Erase and Install really the best thing to do in this situation?
So many questions...
Thanks.

Hey Blue,
Let me see if I can help you a bit.
Logic Studio has 28+ gb of loops. Almost 23 for STP and 6 for the Jam Packs, etc. They should be located in /Library/Audio/Apple Loops/Apple (that's the default install loc.). Copy them to an external drive and then delete them from your main drive. Go to /Library/Audio/Apple Loops Indexes and delete those text files. Now go to /Library/Preferences/Soundtrack Pro and delete those text files, too (more Loop Indexes).
Now open Logic Pro and it will say 'No Apple Loops found'. Click 'OK' and then open your Loop Browser. Drag all the Jam Pack folders, STP folder, etc. that you want to use onto the Loop Browser. Logic will ask you if you want to 'Copy to Loops Folder' or 'Current Location'. Choose 'Current Location'. Logic will now index the loop folders.
NOTE: You can change the names of the folders to suit your liking. For example: I added the 2, 3, 4, 5 after the Jam Pack names to make it look smoother on the popup menu and changed iLife Sound Effects to Sound Effects - iLife and Apple Loops for STP to STP. Now the Jam Packs 1-5 come up first on the popup menu and the FX stay at the bottom. I likee!!
Now, if you like you can take your EXS Factory Samples and Ultrabeat Samples, 3.35 & .889 gb respectively, and copy them to an external drive. I have mine in the same place as my Jam Packs, etc. You can find these files in /Library/Application Support/Logic. Toss out the originals and put ALIASES from the external drive back into the /Lib/App Sup/Logic folder.
Also, if you open STP and click the Search tab in the right pane you will see a button that says 'Setup' next to it. Click that and you can use the checkboxes in the window to activate/deactivate any of the loop folders available.
A clean install is the best IMO if you have a little time because a) you DO NOT have to install GB at all (that saves the .aif file size - Logic Studio uses .caf files at half the size of the originals) b) Logic Studio will install the extra GB or Logic 7 content if you need it at it's reduced size. It will basically get rid of all the old clutter that you do not need. Only install what JP's you want and move the bigger stuff to an external.
Rock up Logic and it should all be in place. That procedure saved me 32.5 gb on my main drive.
NOTE #2: You have another 12 gb (if you installed all Jam Packs) that reside in the /Library/Application Support/GarageBand/Instrument Library/Sampler. These are the Jam Pack Instruments & Sampler files for World, Symphony, etc. They cannot be moved from the startup HD (as far as I can tell). So keep that in mind if you don't want a certain JP.
Hope that helps,
Dave

What's the best way to handle this?

I'm not sure what APIs/setup to use for this situation:
A company wants to store data projects they do for clients. Each year, the data fields are set (as a result of gov't requirements) and they won't change for any client project for that year. however, the fields required can (and usually do) change every year. So things they require this year, might not be needed the next year and new fields might be introduced.
While there are likely to be many common fields from year to year, there's no way to guarantee which ones will remain consistent. They also want to be able to do searches on the data and fields, for projects within a year and across years.
What's the best framework/API/configuration to handle this? EJB? Simple JDBC? If so, how should the database be handled? Won't it have to constantly create new fields in a table? Or is there another way to handle this?
What's the best way from a "clean architecture" standpoint?

dang, I really have to start over? I finally got all this stuff working again. well, hopefully it won't be as big a pain this time since the data won't be coming from a different machine. After completing the Migration Assistant process, I had to reinput a bunch of serial numbers for apps, reinstall print and mouse drivers, etc... I've finally got the new machine up and running smoothly and now I gotta start over? Sigh.
I was hoping that either I could rename the current account after deleting the other one, or just move everything from one account to the other and then delete the 'RJM' account.
ok, so it sounds like here are the steps I need to take:
- make another full cloned backup of this current machine in Super Duper
- reboot this machine using the advice in the first post, wipe everything clean and reinstall the OS
- create a new account like 'user1' and re-do software update (which is like 2.5 gig worth of stuff) and takes like an hour even on a high speed connection
- then re-do the migration assistant process to the properly named account
- then delete the 'user1' account
does that sound right?

Step by Step, what's the best way to shoot slow-mo in HD?

I've read so many articles on here about doing slow motion shooting in final cut but everyone of them left out some important details.
i wanted to see if anyone could give me a step by step on how the best way to shoot something in slow motion in HD would be?
i'm probably planning on just doing this in 720 instead of 1080, but i don't want that to begin to be the topic of discussion, just how how to do slow motion.
some things i want to know about it:
-what is a good shutter speed for this to make the movement look as smooth as possible
-how many frames per second should i shoot? (my camera only goes up to 60fps)
-should i use Cinema Tools in any way?
-any adjustments i might need to do to the timeline in final cut when i drop it in there?
-also, i'd want my whole project video to be done in 720/24p, but i'm guessing for the one shot i want in slow motion i'd have to shoot 720/60p. what do i need to do to get the 60fps footage to work right in a timeline set for 24fps?
if you can't answer all of them, just some help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!!

-what is a good shutter speed for this to make the movement look as smooth as possible< </div>
that's a tough call because the shutter speed will be determined by three things, your ability to understand what we tell you here, yoru photo subject, and the lighting conditions and ability to control them.
-how many frames per second should i shoot? (my camera only goes up to 60fps)< </div>
You can stop there, 60 is not nearly enough to achieve "smooth as possible" slow motion. You need at least 90 frames per second, 120 is even better, 180 is fabulous. You can research "overcranking," temporal resolution, and shooting slow motion for may hours on google.
Post processing a video clip using optical flow is not a viable solution for most subjects. You must consider renting a camera that will do the job properly. If 60 fps is all you're willing or able to shoot, then you must diminish your expectations and carefully consider your photo subject.
bogiesan

I have an iMac purchased new about 5 years ago with OS 10.4.11. I would like to upgrade to Lion. I currently have a 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2 GB of ram. Can I upgrade to Lion, and what is the best way to do so?

I have an iMac purchased new about 5 years ago with OS 10.4.11. I would like to upgrade to Lion. I currently have a 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2 GB of ram. Can I upgrade to Lion, and what is the best way to do so?

From what I read here:
http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/06/lion-...u-2-gb-of-ram/
s long as they already have Snow Leopard 10.6.8 installed in it.All a person needs to do with that type of iMac is to upgrade/max out their Ram. They claim that an Interl iMac with Core 2 Duo is all that is needed, as long as it has OS 10.6.8 installed. They say you don`t need the "Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor"
But I wonder about the RAM speed, the iMac 2.33Ghz uses DDR2 SDRAM, which I believe is rated at 667Mhz. Lion maybe installed but it might be problems running smoothly or not?
Did some quick checking and the iMacs apple is selling this year use 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM.
The only thing to do is to make sure you have a good back-up, Install your RAM and install Snow Leo, then wait a couple of hours and install Lion.
Good Luck

What is the best way to clean up your mac and make it faster and run to an optimum level?

Hi Everyone, Hope all is well
Iv been running my mac pro for a long time now, its a Mac pro, 2x 2.26 GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon. 12 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 Ram
Over time now it has become slower, at the moment its still running fine but im sure over time it has probabally collected unwanted data etc. i just dont want it to become a problem as its only going to be used more and more... i now notice that some of the regular programs which i open do take a little while longer to open and i sometimes see that little round Mac loading the sign (the round multicolor wheel).., is there a way to clean the mac up? so that it can run more smoothly and just a better over all feel.,,, the machine is still running beautifully but its time i give it more care and revive it a little more..
What are the best ways to do this, i dont trust any of these non apple based products which claim they can clean ur Mac etc.
Any solutaion and advice that u guys can give would be great and i would be very thankful
Thanks in advance

For immediate speed improvements, upgrade to a Solid State Drive and upgrade your conventional hard drives to new ones, because the newer ones are faster at reading and writing than the ones from 5 years ago.
By Re-installing your OS onto a solid state drive, the system will boot much faster, and your programs will launch much faster.
I use a small SSD (only 60GB) which contains only OS X and all my apps. All of my personal files are on the large mechanical hard drive. If you still use the drive that shipped with the Mac, then it might be a good idea to replace it.
Depending on what kind of work you do, then additional RAM will help. Swapping CPUs should only be done if you are really in need of the improvements they would bring.
You appear to have the 2009 dual-CPU Mac Pro, which is the most challenging model to swap CPUs into.

Best Way to Stack 2d and 3d in a Composite

Hey everyone, it seems I'm really on a 3d binge with Photoshop CS6. It's just a blast! Anyway, I'm looking to figure out the best way to stack 2d and 3d items together in the same document, and maximize the editibility...
I'm working on a digital room setting, and I have part of the room in 3d and part in 2d. So, for example, the walls, ceiling, floor, table, chairs and corner hutch are 3d, but the regular hutch and buffet server are in 2d.
- The table and chairs need to be in the foreground
- The regular hutch and server are behind the table and chairs
- The corner hutch needs to be behind all other pieces of furniture
So, you may be catching on by now to my little dilemna... I want all the 3D items to have the same lighting and reflect off one another, however, I need the 2d layers to somehow fit "inbetween" the 3d objects. The simple question is, how can this be done? Is there a way to mask the foreground 3D objects so that they appear to be in from of the 2D objects? My only current solution is this:
- Move the whole 3D layer (the scene layer) all the way to the back
- Make the final decision on the position of the table and chairs
- Hide all other meshes in the scene besides the table and chairs
- Render, so the edges are clean
- Load the newly rendered 3D layer as a selection (which loads the table and chairs only)
- Either create a new layer from the selection of the rendered 3D layer, or mask the 3D layer so that the table and chairs appear to be in the foreground
I didn't anticipate this post being this long, so I apologize,... but as you can assume, the method above means I can no longer edit/reposition/scale the 3D at all, so if there's a better way to stack these room elements I would be extremely grateful to whoever knows how!
Thanks!
Andy

First, I was wrong about layers needing to be hidden to prevent their appearance being included in a new Postcard. I misunderstood something that happened when working with a 3D document a while ago.
Materials support transparency/opacity. A material has an opacity control that can use a texture. The material opacity percentage is multiplied by the opacity of the texture.
When a Postcard is created, its default material's opacity control will contain an instance of the texture that's in the diffuse control, which is a PSB file containing the 2D layer (pixels, Shape, Smart Object or Group) from which the Postcard was created.
Here is an example. Two solid Pyramid meshes and a Postcard of a cloud Shape layer:
The Shape layer from which the Postcard was created is in the document that can be opened by picking Edit in the dropdown of the buttons highlighted above:

Best way to burn a DVD+R DL disc?

I was wondering what everyone thought was the best way to burn a DVD+R DL disc.
This is how i do it and let me know if you have better results doing it a different way.
1. Never burn from DVD SP, always use Toast instead.
2. Select All Regions (including #7) in DVD SP
3. Build/Format, then select Harddrive, .img file
4. Use Toast and select Copy, then Image File.
1. I never burn in DVD SP because it uses the fastest write speed that your disc/burner does and this seems to have issues.
2&3. I always select All Region because DVD SP by default doesn't select #7 (no clue to why that is) and if you got to harddrive using .img, then that is CMF format and CMF needs all region (RCM Value of 0). Otherwise DVD SP will have different region codes in the MAIN.DAT vs. the CONTROL.DAT. 0 and possibly 64 or 40.
4. With Toast you can set the write speed. I just use 2X and this takes 40 minutes or so for a full DVD+R DL disc.
But..
Is this the best way?
Or is the DVD-ROM (UDF) option a better way?
Any suggestions?

Hi Brian,
Not that this really helps you solve the dvdsp thing but if they are regular clients maybe buy a cheap(ish) dvd player that plays your discs fine and send them it. Explain the ±DL issues. Say the authoring is fine but the ±DL media thing is a mine field so here is a player so proofing goes smoother in the future.
If Toast is working better then send a media input form with the proof stating where the LB will be on the master etc.
I'd like to hear anything anyone else has to say but I'm sure we're aware of most of the options already.
FWIW, if you're running 10.4.x you can type drutil info in Terminal and hit enter to see what types of media the attached drives can burn,
Good luck,
-Jake

Best way for capturing HDV

Best way for capturing HDV
using easy setup setted to HDV1080 50i (camera is a Sony HDV HC1) captured video look like sh...
and when exported with compressor is worst!
some idea?

Ok fantastic ! you are right (the frustration was talking for me)
video is shooted in 16:9 HDV 1080 50i
Captured video looks:
full of orizontal lines (that look like scan lines) expecially evident on figure edges and on motion subjects
and
like it was resized 1440x1080i from a different lower resolution
video is exported with compressor
MPEG-2 3.7Mbps 2-pass 16:9
Description: Fits up to 150 minutes of video with Dolby Digital audio at 192 Kbps or 120 minutes with AIFF audio on a DVD-5
File Extension: m2v
Video Encoder
Format: M2V
Width and Height: Automatic
Pixel aspect ratio: default
Crop: None
Frame rate: (100% of source)
Frame Controls: Automatic
Aspect ratio: 16:9
Field dominance: Auto detect
Average data rate: 3.7 (Mbps)
2 Pass VBR enabled
Maximum data rate: 7.5 (Mbps)
High quality
Best motion estimation
Closed GOP Size: 1/2 second, Structure: IBBP
DVD Studio Pro meta-data enabled
In these case the first problem is i can't obtain 16:9 format an the lines becomes more more evidents
software is Final cut Studio HD
camera is Sony HDV HC1e
hope I wrote all the info
Thx

Best way to smooth edges

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for