Extracting A Background from an Image Tutorial #2 - Using CS2 Extraction Tool

Short Description
This is tutorial #2 in the series for changing or removing backgrounds. This method uses the extraction tool available in Photoshop CS2 (I’m not sure if it’s available in Photoshop CS, but it won’t be available in any version prior to this). Unfortunately, unless other softwares contain this tool (I don’t know of any that do), the tutorial will only be geared to those who own Photoshop CS2 upwards.

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Content
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This method removes the background from the image, rather than removing the image to a new background.
To begin, open your photo and locate your extraction filter - it can be found under “filter” in the menu (Select “Filter”, then Extract) and open it up.
This filter will not work on 16-bit images, so if you’ve opened a raw file, you’ll need to change the mode to 8-bit (select “image”, then “mode”, then select 8-bit).
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On the left are a series of tools - the first one is the “highlighter” for drawing around the areas you want to keep; the second is the paint bucket fill, next is an eraser, an eyedropper, two masking tools, and magnifying glass (for zooming in and out) and the hand tool (for moving your image around within the filter).
On the right are some options you can set: tool options are the brush size, the highlight color and the fill color, as well as a box for “smart highlighting”. Smart highlighting works best on high contrast images with sharp edges, but not so well on other types of images. The extraction options are for a textured image, and for smoothing, an extraction channel and an option to force the color of the foreground.
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