The Perils Of Cutting Out FrouFrou Hair In Photoshop & Commissioning Photo Shoots

I’ve had to give many a hair-do a haircut & blow dry in Photoshop throughout the last year.

The website of the company I work for has a profile pic & short biography for each employee & I’ve had to cut out every single one of them from a professionally shot source image.

The Magic Wand tool has been my friend through some trying times (it selects colour variants within a defined tolerance so with a single click you can sometimes select the whole background & delete it simply). I also gave the magnetic lasso a go, but does not like. It detects edges as you draw but isn’t very good at subtle colour/texture variance.

I also discovered & refined a method to make cut-outs have a softer edge without making them look obviously cut-out from whatever background they will then be pasted onto. I bound it to an F-key and got myself a system.

Then I created an automated action that generates 2 layers – one entirely black, one white to check for ‘Art Garfunkeling’ prior to saving:

This is all good and allowed good productivity gains by automating tasks where possible.

I now present the good & the bad from this whole process in the hope it may help anyone ready to avoid some of the pitfalls I’ve fallen down, but somehow managed to grab onto the edge of the pit mid-fall to narrowly avoid getting speared on the sharp spikes of death below.

Good things:

• Bald men,
• Men with turbans,
• Women with short hair,
• Women with straight hair.

 

All these things are very easy to cut around and generally make my working day easier to cope with. The following things are the opposite of these things.

 

Bad Things:

• People wearing similar coloured clothing to that of the background,
• Photographer always ensuring the presence of a huge green plant either behind or over the right shoulder of each person,
• 300 people all wanting to see the whole portfolio of their session to choose the ‘best’ photo,
• ‘Froufrou’ hair do’s (see again the above image of Mr Garfunkel).
• People looking miserable on EVERY pic and still moaning that there’s not a single ‘good’ picture of them
• Photographer (a frustrated fashion pap?) leaning into increasingly trendy angles of shot, thus ensuring 50% of pics are unusable/have no right shoulder.
• “Can you make me look younger?” requests.
• Cleavage-exposing blouse wearers complaining it looks like a page 3 shot
• In relation to the above, same people usually moan they haven’t had their hair/nails/makeup/eyebrows cut/applied/plucked (usually accompanied by a “can you just”… Photoshop request)
• People not turning up to their pre-booked shoot slot (despite agreeing to do so), then sending an irate email asking why they aren’t on the website yet.
• After being told “Sorry, but I have 300 of these to do and can’t send out pics to every fee-earner for approval. Please be assured I’m choosing the best pic for each person” getting a reply saying “I understand, but I’d still like to see them please.”
• After seeing the finished pic on the website, getting an email saying “I don’t like the picture you’ve chosen, please use this one instead” (‘this one’ is either a vastly inferior shot from the same session or some horrible low-res pic from a 1Mp phone camera).
• Explaining to people each of them has a ‘formal’ shot (tie & suit jacket for the men, suit jacket for women) and an ‘informal’ shot (no suit jacket & tie optional for the men, no suit jacket for women) then getting the “I understand but…” email (see above)
• Trying to figure out how to automate an action that takes each cropped image (300 source images) and generates 10 versions of each, each with one of our corporate colours as a background (result – 3,000 output images).
• Watching Adobe do a 2 minute long WSOP (White Screen Of Paralysis) when asked to do anything as unusual & demanding as opening or saving a file that’s any bigger than 72DPI.
• Listening to the internal fans of my PC rev up to take-off speed when performing the above two actions.

 

As you can see it’s about 80/20 in favour of bad over good in this situation. so if you have to do any of this stuff now you’re in the know about the realities of the job.

Fore-warned is fore-armed.