PDN Fanatics

Hey all, I was wondering if anyone with rendering skills can do me a huge favor and render this image of Magic Johnson for me? I'm totally lame at rendering images that will look good when placed on any colored background, so I thought I'd ask for a lil help from you all. I'd like his whole body with the basketball rendered (plus the space between his knees). If anyone can take on this task, please let me know. I'd totally appreciate it.

Try using the line tool to create the outline for cutting out the image, and then cut out the background from Magic Johnson. Did I understood you right?

Other options are to use the magic wand & set the flood mode to GLOBAL. Be careful to check that it has only selected the bits you want cut out. You have to find just the right tolerance. Then tidy up the image with the eraser. You will need to use zoom & sometimes it involves erasing one pixel at a time. Then try feather and/or gaussian blur.

Best tip of all is to read David Atwell's DPI & you on the main forum. Resize the image as large as possible & then when you're done with the render, reduce it to the size you want. E.g. 3200 x 2400 (multiples of 4 seem to work the best) then resize to 800 x 600. Any ho-hum bits will disappear & the image will look much smoother & polished.

Sorry buddy but this is very time consuming & not an image I would enjoy working on.

I know that you really just want someone to do it for you but honing your skills will be much better for you in the long run.

You know the old saying: give a man a fish & you'll feed him for a day - trach him to fish & you will feed him for the rest of his life

Here's another technique that provides a crisp and smooth outcome: use the line and paintbrush tools to create a "cookie-cutter" overlay on a new layer. Then create a new layer underneath that, and fill it with white. Save that as a PNG (Because it's lossless) and then use the Alpha Mask plugin (ooh v2 is out!) to create a pixel-perfect cut-out of your subject. That's how I always do it. I used to do it bit by bit with the lasso.. ugh. Time consuming and messy.

Have a nice day,
~Sidneys1

Thanks for all the tips people.

sometimes I make a duplicate layer and change it to solarize effects>color>solarize (might be Ed harvey plugin) this makes some of the colors pop against the background. then do my cut out (same as the tut cut it out the easy way)

on this image try under adjustments auto level first then curves+ one dot at 88, 189 this almost blurs out the background and should make it much easier to see where to draw your lines.

ciao OMA