I must, must, must share this!  I’ve been reading the latest blog post from the creator of the G’MIC Plug-in.  He’s been adding more filters to the plug-in and has written up a blog post talking about the new filters.

I have tried some of them out and I came across one that really blew me away!  It’s an interactive foreground extraction filter.  Basically, the filter does the extraction once you tell it a few key points, and then after a few minutes of rendering, it extracts your foreground and background from each other leaving the remaining area transparent.  And you didn’t have to use a selection tool and try to trace around it!

Here is my final image extraction after just a few extra tweaks…

Go to Filters->G’MIC->Contours->Extract foreground [interactive] (click to enlarge screenshot)…

Here is the filter in action (click to enlarge)…

By simply typing F while hovering the mouse over foreground areas, B for background areas, and space bar to see the extraction mask while you work you can easily pull the foreground out with minimal effort!

Here’s the foreground and background after running G’MIC (note that I only had to retouch a few areas with the eraser tool)…

You can get the G’MIC Plug-in for GIMP* here.

Until next time…
~nic

* GIMP is Open Source software that is available for all platforms (Linux, Mac, and Windows), it is a photo editor that does many (if not all) of the things you can do in Photoshop. You can download it for free here. The GIMP online manual can be found here.