selections/masks

[chauncey]

Making selections on intricate subjects (frizzy hair/tree line) is a PITA regardless which tool is used in CS4, even when using channels and/or levels.
Is there a plug-in or something better out there?

[Free]

is there a hi contrast background?

if so, or even not too high contrast I was taught the following for intricate selections

Fist hit ctrl+1 (show red channel) then ctrl+2 (green) and then ctrl+3 (blue) to see which has the most contrast between the selection and the background. Go back to best contrast channel.

Then alt+s wait half a second push c (select - colour) then click on the background, if there are a couple colours you can hold shift and click again. adjust you slider to get a decent select, I'm usually around 60. When your marching ants are looking close, hit enter.

Then go into your channels pallete (next to layers by default) and save selection as alpha channel (rectangle with circle in it). (will get black selection) Ctrl+d to deselect.

Make sure you're on the alpha channel and ctrl+l (levels) drag the left slider most of the way to the right and the right to the left until you've got nice crisp lines.

paint black and white in appropriate areas to make the rest of your selection. Ctrl+ click alpha channel to load selection...

Almost there...

Click on rgb channel (if you don't the next step will just go into quick mask mode) switch back to layers pallete and make layer mask as per usual.

Too easy

[chauncey]

Gonna have to try that technique, thanks Free.

[dcclark]

Another useful technique (to add to Free's excellent advice) is -- if you don't need crisp edges, you might do as good a job of selecting the subject as you can, and then feather the selection. This will make the edges slightly "fuzzy" as they fade out, but also may help the result fade into the background better.