Subtitles of the Movie

Well how do you get something like the sunflower on its own layer? Well one of the ways you could do that is painstakingly try to create a selection using the lasso tool around the edges of the sunflower, but that's kind of a drag. There is an easier way called the Extract commend. And before I use the Extract command, because what it does is it etches away everything that is not in the selection and deletes it, creating a transparent background. Before I do that, I'm going to copy my layer so that if my Extract Command doesn't do a good job, I can always start over again. So here is my copy, the layer that I'm going to run the Extract command on. Image menu>Extract. And it brings up this very interesting interface. To the left here, we have some tools that we can use to begin the extraction process, and to the right of my image we have various options. I can choose what brush size I want by clicking on this slider and dialing it up and down. And notice when I move into my image, the Extract command shows me a graphic, a small circle of how big my brush will be. I prefer to use Smart Highlighting, because it seems to work best. Well, what is smart highlighting or what is highlighting? Well the way the Extract command works is first you use this highlighter brush icon to create a somewhat sloppy edge around your image, and in this case my flower, and then we fill that with the paint bucket tool. So to show you how this works, I'll dial down my brush size and begin painting. And you can see that the Extract command just gives me the highlight color green. If this were a green object, you might want to choose a different color. In fact, I am going to choose a different color because it does become green down here. Just choose red. And for the fill color, I'll leave that as blue. If you click Other, it brings up the color picker, and you can choose whatever color you need to so it's a nice contrasting color. But you can see that it is creating a fairly fat edge effect; I'm going to undo that and I'm going to enable Smart Highlighting. Because what that does is it creates its own, it decides how big the highlight needs to be. And if it can detect a sharp edge, it makes a very small mark. While you are highlighting, if you make a mistake you can hold down the Option key, and the tool will turn into an eraser brush, and you can paint backwards to erase it. Or if you hold down the Command key, it will turn into the regular highlighting tool, not the smart one - and you can see in this case it is creating a very fat effect. So, I'm going to hold down the Option key and that's the Alt key on the PC to get my temporary eraser brush. You could also choose the eraser brush by clicking on the eraser brush icon. And the nice thing about Smart Highlighting is that if your edge is anywhere inside the circle, the Smart Highlighter will add the appropriate size highlight mark. OK, once you have the object highlighted, you can choose to fill it with the paint bucket tool. And you really need to do this in order to isolate the center of the area that you want to keep. So I'm going to just click, and since I've created this moat of color my fill stops around the edge of the moat. Well this looks pretty good. Let's see the effect - I'll click the Preview button and it should strip away the background. And it did a pretty good job. However there are some artefacts down here at the bottom, which I might want to clean up using one of these two tools. I'm going to use the Clean Edges brush, and what this does is it re-focuses the highlight edge effect. So if you have sloppy edges, you can use the clean edges brush. If you want to punch a hole somewhere in your object, use the Mask brush. And this will create a little hole, and it is an accumulative effect. So you might have to pass over your objects a few times, and you can see it's etching a hole there. Why, I really don't want that. So I'm going to hit Command + Z: undo that last option. If you have a very wispy object, you might choose Force Foreground. And if this is enabled, you can sample a foreground color before you choose Force Foreground, and it won't touch any of your foreground colors that way. Also if you had a mask loaded for that edge effect, you could load that using your channel. But since we don't have a channel with this object, since I don't have a mask channel associated with it, this is not available. Finally at the bottom, you can choose what you want to see. Currently I'm showing my Preview at Extracted, or I could choose to see the original. And if there is a color problem, you might need to see it on something other than the transparency background. So under Display, you have some other options: Black Matte, Gray Matte, and in this way you might be able to see some edge problems like over here. And you can always choose to see the fill or the highlight of your edge. If you need to, you can zoom in using the Zoom tool - just select it by clicking on it, and click in your image and it will zoom in. Hold the Option key down or the Alt key on the PC and click the zoom out. And if you zoomed in, you can scroll around using the hand tool. Well I think this looks pretty good, I'm going to click OK and accept that effect, and fill my background with red. So there you have it - there is my sunflower floating on its own layer, using the Extract command.