Screen Recording Analysis

This post is about my screen recording of me separating “Spike” from the background. I want this image of “Spike” to be placed on the front cover with a background that I have chosen.

Screen Recording Rubbing Out

This was my first attempt, I tried erasing the outline so that I could remove “Spike” from the image. 
However, I did not finish this as I was shown a better and much easier technique to accomplish this…

Screen Recording Magic Wand Tool

This tool allowed me to erase the background much quicker. It required a new layer to be added so that it could distinguish between different layers. This way, I will add the background as the very bottom layer, the magazine title as the second bottom layer and finally the image of “Spike” on top. This is very typical of Kerrang! magazines, which will often have parts of the magazine title blocked out of view by an artist’s image. This has the effect of them appearing to be almost jumping out of the page.

Zooming in on the image made it easier for me to use the tool in the more detailed areas.

The tool required me to select several points on the page, it would register the shades that I had selected and create a quick selection, enclosing areas within the several points that I had created with the same shades.

Then I can clear the sections that are in the quick selection mode.

This meant that I could quickly delete large areas of the background of the image without having to do this using the eraser tool (which would have taken much longer!)

The only problem with this tool is that it can automatically select parts of the image that I don’t want to erase, meaning that I have to do quite a lot of undoing of my actions.

I mainly had problems with this when erasing parts of the top right, bottom left and right sections. This happened (partly due to my lack of experience but also) because the automatic tone register would often mistake similar shades or areas that were lacking detail. The bottom right hand side took several attempts the white shirt worn by “Spike” was the same colour as the wall that was in the background.

Also on the bottom left hand side, the shadow on “Spike’s” inner arm was difficult to separate from the slight gap between his arm and his body.

I had to change the size of the tool, making it smaller for the more in depth details that required attention.

The most troublesome part was his hair, as the spikes were sometimes lacking detail and the magic tool would erase them, again meaning that I would have to undo and try again. I also am aware that on occasions.

I ended up deleting more of the image than I would like to have, a few strands of hair were too difficult to keep in the image so they were lost when I used this method.