Photoshop Channel Masks

Using the combination of Channel Masks and Magnetic Lasso Selection Tool to make a perfect human selection.

Sometime you have several shots of nice scenery and you wanted to put your own picture into the scenery you can use the following method to do the selection.
Use Photoshop 7 to open a photo contains a personal picture, follow the steps below to do the selection.

1. Press control-A follow by control shift -J to create a "blank" layer.
2. Duplicate Photo Layer then click (Window)(Channel) to bring down the Channel Window.
3. Click the Blue Channel. (It shows the darkness of photo is darker than other channels).
4. Press "d" to change the foreground color to black.
5. Use Magnetic Lasso tool to select those parts which are not black enough.
6. Use brush tool to paint the selected parts to black, then unselected the painted parts.
7. Click (Image)(Level) to bring down the Level Window, move the tiny black triangle to the right to make the picture totally black, then Press "OK".
8. Use the brush tool to paint the picture again in black.
9. Click (Selection)(Load the Selection) to select the picture, click the Photo Layer and click (selection)(Inverse) to inverse the selection.
10. Press the delete key to delete the background.
11. Click the Picture Layer, and then click the (Layer)(Matting- Remove white Matt) to remove the tiny white spots around the edges.

Now you can drag and drop the human picture to any photo of scenery.

Use Channel Mask and Magnetic Lasso Selection Tool to select the human image.

Drag and drop the selected human picture into the photos of scenery.