Could do with a bit of basic editing help!

[northwest monkey]

Hi all,

I need a bit of help & advice on editing some photos to save me retaking them all again! I'm currently a seller on Ebay & have been asked by Amazon to do some selling on there. Not a problem, apart from all our photos are currently taken against a purple background & Amazon require a white one.

What I was thinking of was something like the Photoshop tool where you can trace around the picture, then cut it out & paste it onto a new (white) backdrop. I know it's a bit more complicated than that, but I remember doing something years ago & that was about the long & short of it.

I don't have Photoshop or any other tools - something free would be nice (I've heard of GIMP?) and also some idea of how to do it!

Hopefully the picture below will give you an idea of what I mean!

If I have to retake all the pictures it will be a nightmare - there will be about 6 or 7 pictures for the outfit below & there will be somewhere between 50-100 items, so I reckon about 500 pictures!

Thanks in advance,

Dave

[markmullen]

As the background colour is quite different to the garment I'd use the magic wand tool to select the background using quite a big tolerance to allow for the shadows, this will select all the purple.

Photoshop is the master but GIMP is good for Yorkshire's Best Price.

[northwest monkey]

Sounds like a good start

Any idea what version of Gimp I should get or is it fairly self explanatory?

I'm using Vista so I'm assuming they do a version!

I vaguely remember the magic wand tool in Photoshop - can that be used to "trace" round the photo or not?

[Nick Grant]

You could outsource this task quite cheaply too, lots of Indian or Chinese companies online who will do the cut out and backgroud replace for you.

[markmullen]

northwest monkey said:

I vaguely remember the magic wand tool in Photoshop - can that be used to "trace" round the photo or not?

It selects sections of the same colour, by increasing the tolerance you'll select all the purple, even in the shadows.

[northwest monkey]

Nick Grant said:

You could outsource this task quite cheaply too, lots of Indian or Chinese companies online who will do the cut out and backgroud replace for you.

This is probably true, but "quite cheaply" is over my budget of "free"

I'll give the Gimp thing a go & see how I get on. Ideally I wanted to do a huge upload of stock onto Amazon, hence the idea of just clicking on something, cutting it out & pasting it into a new layer (I definitely remember Photoshop having this ability!).

Worst case, I'll retake the photos & just upload a bit slower!

Thanks for your help chaps - I'll probably be back to ask more questions once I've downloaded Gimp if that's ok

[Simpo Two]

It's much quicker to press a button than try to cut things out. If you still have all the stuff I'd reshoot. Get the first one set up how you want it, then bosh bosh bosh x500.

[andyr30]

Took me 2 mins to do using wand tool, was pretty rough round edges so contracted selection, inverted selection, feathered edge by 1 pixel. Made the edges a litlle less choppy but could be better.

It can be done...would be maybes 5 mins per image to get perfect

500 images...5mins an image...41hours of work

Would be quicker to resnap the lot!

Iron your next backdrop!

Edited by andyr30 on Thursday 5th January 13:33

[northwest monkey]

andyr30 said:

Took me 2 mins to do using wand tool, was pretty rough round edges so contracted selection, inverted selection, feathered edge by 1 pixel. Made the edges a litlle less choppy but could be better.

It can be done...would be maybes 5 mins per image to get perfect

500 images...5mins an image...41hours of work

Would be quicker to resnap the lot!

Iron your next backdrop!

Edited by andyr30 on Thursday 5th January 13:33

I think you might be right!

Thanks for all your advice folks - I'll get cracking with the camera I think!

Dave

[Simpo Two]

Getting the background white will be the hardest part - but if you throw enough light at it (and I mean a lot) and expose for the relatively dark subject, with luck it will go white. Even if it doesn't, it will be much easier to fix than what you had before.

[Pixel Pusher]

Never used them, but......

http://www.misterclipping.com/

[Simpo Two]

£0.75 to £5.00 per image = £375 - £2,500 = over the budget of £0!

[Pixel Pusher]

Meh, budget, schmudget........

[Simpo Two]

I could swear you posted that yesterday...

[Pixel Pusher]

Good spot, I did, but after re-reading it, the solution seemed a bit convoluted so I binned it.


Reshoot!!

[northwest monkey]

Pixel Pusher said:

Good spot, I did, but after re-reading it, the solution seemed a bit convoluted so I binned it.


Reshoot!!

Sorry to dig this thread up, but how on earth did you do that!

I've tried retaking pictures on a white background, but that looks much better.

Please help

[Bacardi]

He, or one of his chaps most likely did it using the pen tool, which would take a couple of mins if you have spent time learning how to use it.

Depending on contrast with background you could also use a variety of selection tools like Quick selection tool, colour range etc and then convert the selection to a path and then refine that with the pen tool, but usually it's quicker just to whip round a simple outline with the pen tool to start with.

All this doing stuff for 'free' is only only true if your time is worthless. If you have nothing better to do then by all means spend weeks mastering the pen tool, or if you have however many days it will take for you to reshoot it all, and still end up with a less than white background (although much easier to clean up), by all means go ahead and do it. If on the other hand, your time can be more profitably spent doing something 'you' are good at, send them to India and get some kid to cut them out for 75p a pop.

The most valuable thing anyone has in this life is 'time'. That'll be £10 please.

[Pixel Pusher]

Yep, cut a path round it, make selection and drop the background out to white.

Not the only way but probably the best in terms of edge quality.