Extracting a person from a picture and place in another

---

By John Sweeney - 16th of January 2007

---

Extracting a person, or object, from one picture and placing them in another:

Have you ever wondered how you can take a person out of one picture and place them in another setting with a different background; e.g. place someone on a picture of New York, London, Paris, or some other pleasing background.

Well, here's how to do it.

1. Open the picture from which you wish to extract a person or object.
   
2. Open the picture that you want to add the extracted person, or object to.
   
3. Now select the first picture by clicking on it and go to the menu-bar and select Filter, then the extract command.
   
4. You will now be presented with a new action box with the selected picture within it and here's where we start to select and extract the picture we want.
   
5. To set it all up first select a nice large brush size in the tool options on the right hand side of the pallet, make sure the brush is big enough to cover a few centimetres both inside and outside the picture. (This is actually the edge selector tool on the top left of the pallet.
   
6. Now select round the image making sure that the brush overlaps the picture, when you have completed going round the image and the two lines join up (From the start line to the finish).
   
7. Next select the fill bucket tool towards the top left of the pallet, just below the edge highlighter tool, and move it inside the area you have selected, then click the left mouse button to fill.
   
8. When the image is filled click the OK on the top right of the pallet.
   
9. The extracted image will now appear in it's own frame with no background.
   
10. Now all you have to do is select the image and drag it into your 2nd picture, there you can resize it and place it where it is most pleasing and appears to fit. Always try to resize with the shift key depressed, this will help maintain the regular shape of the image, otherwise you may end up with a short fat image or a long thin out of proportion image.
    
11. Make sure that the layers pallet is open (F7 on your keyboard) and flatten the image, now you can save it and, oh, remember to give it a name other than the one already used, in order to preserve the original image.
    
12. Lastly, close down the first image without saving the changes, also in order to preserve the image.
    

Happy Extracting.