Any solution for this knock out?

[didiermazier]

Hi y'all

I am trying to isolate the herbs in the foreground.

Tried  almost anything (chanels, selections, masking, highpass…) without any good result.

Any clues?

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

If you're talking about the grass in the foreground, I'm not certain any automatic selection will work with this fine of detail withour requiring a LOT of cleanup.

Have you considered going old school and using Quick Mask and a brush?

[didiermazier]

yes that grass… I did as well as many other tricks. 

The solution provided by Daves seems interesting…

[davescm · Accepted solution]

Hi

I thought Select focus might help - it doesn't.

So next I tried bit of lateral thinking. Taking a copy of the image and using Find edges followed by Gaussian blur then using a black and white layer adjustment plus a curve to invert gave a starting point for a mask. The top edge of the land needs to be brushed over as do some lines around the farm and some holes at the bottom.

A couple of minutes with the brush to brush out the obvious areas gave this:

Then making the result a mask :

How much work it still needs to finish it depends on what you are using it against. I would not finish it until I had it in the new composite.

Dave

[didiermazier]

Dave you are the best!

[davescm]

Thanks - It was a challenge and the mask is not perfect but, depending on where you intend to use the result, may be OK or need more work. At least its a start.

Dave

[didiermazier]

Here is the final use of the grass… As usual the project was planned for yesterday so it is not perfect, but necessary and enough as the math guys say.

Again thank you for this precious hint and your time. 

[D Fosse]

This is excellent work, Dave - or rather, excellent thinking! And like all brilliant solutions, it's so obvious when you see it. You just wouldn't have thought of it yourself... 😉

[davescm]

Thank you Dag, our minds work in mysterious ways 🙂

Also thanks to Didier for following up with the final use, it was good to see how it was applied.

Dave