Hi all.
Below you can see a Motorbike in front of a green background and a tan ground. My challange is to cut out the bike and make the background transparent. It should not be too difficult, because the background is mainly in 2 areas. Unfortunately all my attempts failed or were to complicated.
My workflow:
Prepare the RAW file in DxO as best as possible to easy cut off.
Export to tif.
Import tif to Affinity Photo 2 and start with selection to cut off.
The callenges are the spokes. Just by selecting the spokes with the selection tool in Affinity is making me crazy.
Now, my idea is, to optimize the export by DxO to make it easier to select the wanted areas in Affinity. Maybe with a luminosity mask? I tried to make the background black using HSL and Channel mixer, unfortunately with no really good success.
All suggestions are very much appreciated, thank you in advance.
Here we have an example that probably illustrates why DxO’s evangelist said in a webminar that if photolab ever offered this type of tool, it would have to be much better than what adobe offers.
Many thanks to all those who answered. It confirms that the results do not correspond to the expenses. And the results are still not satisfactory. Perhaps we simply have to accept that various things cannot (or cannot yet) be realized satisfactorily. That’s why it’s a good experience for me, but as @Wolfgang said, “don’t waste your time”, so I want to focus on the things that are feasible.
Agreed, and it needs to come soon imo. the crux with new features is, that they are often half baked and take a long row of (payable) upgrades to complete, if at all.
If one has a lot of resources, progressing over a wide front is possible, but smaller companies should (imo) avoid this strategy and add one or two complete features instead. Of course, DxO can progress according to their own visions. We users can only vote with our money.
While this image may not achieve your goals, to me, it works beautifully! Not sure how difficult it was to do this, but changing the background to black is beautiful. It even works for the black tires! Ain’t nuthin’ here to complain about!!! Well, maybe the stand holding up the bike, but that too is OK. Very nice!
@mikemyers , have in mind, the output in DxO should be the preparation for Affinity import to make the background transparent. This pic is a good preparation but e.g. the contrast to the spokes is not good enough for importing.
Aha, well, for that purpose I guess it isn’t “good enough” yet, but I like it a lot!
If that was my bike, that photo would be hanging on my wall!
(In my opinion, for whatever it’s worth) You did GOOD!)
It was a few clicks and a few slider-drags using Lightroom Classic’s AI masking.
masking for the object was not that good, but masking the background did much better
tried lighting up the background, making it darker yielded a better result
And that is all I did. Perfecting the whole thing would have been much more effort and time spent on an image that, had the separation been prepared while taking the photo, might have been easier to work on. Unstructured, monochromatic backdrops are what you’d use in such cases.
Brushing a mask over it would have done it probably, but I was after a proof of concept, not a perfect result.
Other than that, if we’d remove the stand, the bike’s rear wheel would hover over the ground in a somewhat strange way… We’d have to do something about the shadow too, and, and, and…
