How to remove background

[bobgreen2]

I have a new job building a website for a jewelry store.

I have done websites before but the owner wants me to be in charge of taking pictures as well.

He uses a special light box designed to light the jewelry from the sides, top, and bottom with florescent light. The problem is that there is too much light for the camera so I have to use background slips to darken the background so the camera can focus on the actual image.

I have used pink, blue, and black. The blue ones come out the best. You can see a test picture here:

http://www.themerchantagency.com/test.jpg

I have some experience with photoshop but not alot. The owner has version 7.

How can I easily remove the blue background from this test picture? I tried using the Magic Wand Tool but that only takes the background away up until a certain point and it leaves another 20 minutes of work to remove the background pieces that it missed.

Is there an easier way to remove the background? In the end, I want a picture of just the bracelet with a white background for web posting.

Thank you for your help!

 

[rickwells]

I've got to say I believe the secret is in the photography. I know of at least one jeweller who uses one of these light boxes himself to photograph products for his website and he achieves good results with only a soft drop shadow on the white. If you have control over the photography then I recommend that you experiment until you get it right. Once you've got it set - that's it. Even if you can achieve good cut-outs from a coloured background, using Photoshop, you're bound to get some reflections of that colour in the jewellery.
An alternative to the magic wand is to use the channels to make a cutout mask. You should find plenty references via Google although I'm sure you will get some tips through this forum. I will soon be putting together a jewellery website and doing the photography myself. I too will be using one of those light boxes and I certainly intend to get white backgrounds at photography stage with very little cutting out in Photoshop. ( fingers crossed !! ) Good luck.

 

[emkemner]

The easiest way ive found to cut out objects like this in photo shop is to use channels. Open your channels pallet and click on the individual channles untill you find the one that has most contrast difference between the image and the background. Once you find the best channle for this photo copy it and work in the copied channel. Using the burn/dodge tools you can make the entire background either white or black and the object the opposite. use the tool options for shadow/highlights/midtones to work around the object, when you have the object and background black/white load the channel as a selection and go back to your layers pallet. either delete the selected background or copy/paste the object onto a new layer.

 

[dagger2002]

theirs also always color range.

select>color range

when you have it open play with the fuzziness meter to get a desired amount of color out.

but like rickwells said:

you're bound to get some reflections of that colour in the jewellery.

So be careful when using this method.