Tuesday Tutorial: Easy Extraction..Well Maybe

I have always had a hard time with extractions, and when I saw this tutorial over at Scotty Girl Designs, I thought I'd give it a try. Now, this does want a fairly clear background and in the original tutorial she uses a patterned paper but one with no texture.

I had to go through my stash to find one like that or at least close. I used one from Katie Pertiet's ShellColl4 (no longer for sale). Katie's paper has a lot of layers in the creation of this jpg, I'd say. This is about as clear a background as I'd buy.

Ok, As Scotty Girl did with her paper,  I cropped that bottom left section with the red lighthouse.

Next step was to use the Magic Wand on the white background, with these settings.

After hitting CMD-X on my Mac (CTRL-X on a PC), I got this. hmmm. Not quite enough.

So I repeated the process and got more. But somehow this was telling me this was not the best way to get that lighhouse.

I finally bit the bullet and used the Quick Selection tool, by starting at the top of the lighthouse, and without lifting my finger from my mouse, continued dragging down the lighthouse. I then let go of the mouse, and right clicked, getting this choice.

I selected Layer via Copy and then had my Lighhouse on its own layer. Clean and neat  except that I forgot to include that top bit of the tower.

So I started again, with that cropped bit of Katie's paper. I used the Quick Selection tool from the very start, making sure to start my dragging from the tip of the tower. One selection and I had this.

There is the lighthouse, right on its own layer, with only one step. While Scotty Girl's tutorial might work for those who have very simple images to extract on very very plain paper, I think the Quick Selection tool works best here. But try both ways out and see what works for you. There are a million and one ways to do the same thing in all the Adobe software programs so you're sure to find the one that works for you! Happy Scrapping!