My first attempt at a PNG

[CRayChosen1]

Hello everyone!

I've only had Paint.net for a couple of days (literally) and I absolutely love it. I hope to use this quite a bit soon, but I decided to play around with it and create my first PNG image. The subject I used is of retired figure bodybuilder (and good friend of mine) Christine Pomponio-Pate. I'm very amateur, so my first attempt is far from perfect. 

 

The original photo:

 

 

My PNG:

 

 

I hope this is the place to ask for advice, but for those that know how to clean up PNGs, I'd would appreciate it greatly. Thank you!

[IRON67]

To avoid the unclean edges when you crop, I recommend to use Red Ochre's Tweak Transparency v2. with "edge colour" and "middle colour" on "source".

Edited June 29, 2016 by IRON67

[CRayChosen1]

Thanks for the tip. I will check on that and see it if makes a difference. Thank you!

[Red ochre]

Good job CrayChosen1 - it's not easy to cleanly extract a figure from a complex background.

The 'AA's Assistant' effect is also useful for smoothing the edges of objects.
It's in Dpy's pack here:http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?showtopic=16643

[Darty]

This is exactly what I'm doing too. Deleting backgrounds from photos to get people out.
I'm also 'very amateur' and without any fancy photoshop usage, I just use Paint & Paint.Net to do the job.
Paint to delete the original background between/around the person from the original photo (save as PNG or work is for nothing!)

and Paint.Net for anything Transparent/Layer related.
 

- it's not easy to cleanly extract a figure from a complex background.

 

Most photos indeed have a complex multicolored background, so it's hard to select one color and remove everything behind/around the person that is close to that 1 color.
I've found for me the easiest way is to manually draw around the person in Paint, using pencil combined with line tool. This for me is the only way to exactly remove the background pixels I want.
When a static colored area has been created around the person, just use the custom select tool to remove the remaining background.
After that, it's on to Paint.Net to delete the static background and make the edges smooth.

Do note: Like in your image, due to lighting, the person gets white glow on the body, which will result in deletion of those parts as well.
What I do:
- If you only need to delete the background (no gaps between arms etc) then you can draw a line very close to white to close that gap, so there'll be no bite out of the arm.
But you have 1 gap between an arm and some between fingers, so you'll have to set the Magic Wands' Floodmode to Global and Tolerance to 0%. This will also select/delete the glow on the body
To prevent this, you could do 2 things:
* Recolor the exact white parts in the glow with a color very close to white, so you don't see a difference, or:
* Just use another paint color when removing the background. If you see white glow on body parts close to the border, then I'd recommend to use a darker color to delete the background.

 

The 'AA's Assistant' effect is also useful for smoothing the edges of objects.

 

Here I want to point out the plugin people recommended to me, after recently asking for a specific edge-smoothing option.
Feather and AA's Assistant work quite nice for pixels close to eachother, but if you get longer horizontal/vertical lines, you'll still see the edges.
The best way to see the difference is just visiting my thread and look for the image examples, see what fits you best.

Good luck with your editing, if there are better tips to even select all multicolors and get the object out like you'd paint it manually, I'll be VERY interested for the how-to's.

Edited July 6, 2016 by Darty

[Red ochre]

 

I'll be VERY interested for the how-to's.

Have you tried TR's 'Alpha cutter'? - see the video of how to use it (and turn up the volume )

Here http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?showtopic=26966

 

There are many different techniques for cutting out objects. I guess it all depends on how accurate you need things to be. Sometimes there is no difference at all between the perceived 'object' and the background. You just have to make a choice as to where the object edge is. Eg. Blonde hair against a cornfield background.

[Darty]

Have you tried TR's 'Alpha cutter'? - see the video of how to use it

Watched the video, it looks very nice. Still has a lot of 'manual' tweaking in it though, which I now do with the Line/Pencil in Paint itself.

Magic Wand and Alpha Cutter are nice for backgrounds/objects with mostly the same color to define the cutting positions, but usually it's very complex.

For now I'll stay my own boss and decide where to remove the background myself. May be a bit more work, but it works for sure.

Note that many images also need small holes to be created, depending on the position of the person (usually arms/legs/fingers) and other objects, like hanging jewelery and hair.

Where I just draw a very small white line, I don't know how Alpha Cutter will handle such small areas.

[IRON67]

BTW. With a little bit of patience you can do it without any plugin - just with Lasso Tool for the big pieces and the eraser for the edges.

 

See here (don't worry about the black background: the image is in fact transparent):

 

Edited July 5, 2016 by IRON67

[Darty]

With a little bit of patience you can do it without any plugin - just with Lasso Tool for the big pieces and the eraser for the edges.

That's basically what I do, but then in Paint.

Eraser: The Line is for longer distances/curves and Pencil for somewhat complexer places.

Lasso Tool: Custom Select (instead of Rectangle Select, to remove the remainings of background).

Although Paint.Net is a very great application, for purely painting I still prefer Paint.

Both ways to cut out an object will do after all.

Now just hope CRayChosen1 is able to work something out himself for future images.

Transparent images are trendy!