moving subject to different background?

[RJCONKLIN]

i have photoshop cs, photoshop cs user guide and photoshop classroom in a book. i have spent weeks trying to figure out how to take a subject out and transfer that subject to a new background. here is an example. if i had a picture of a person standing next to an old building and i wanted to extract that person and put he or she on an all white or blue or any colored background i cannot figure out how to do that. can someone help me. thank you.

[PacAce]

i have photoshop cs, photoshop cs user guide and photoshop classroom in a book. i have spent weeks trying to figure out how to take a subject out and transfer that subject to a new background. here is an example. if i had a picture of a person standing next to an old building and i wanted to extract that person and put he or she on an all white or blue or any colored background i cannot figure out how to do that. can someone help me. thank you.

The most obvious, albeit the most tedious, too, is to use the polygonal lasso tool to select the person and then copy him/her into another image with a different background. You may need to feather the select a bit so that it doesn't look like it was cut and pasted on to the new background.

When doing this, I like to work with 200% zoom and then make the selection small section at a time. You have to hold the shift key when making a new selection to add to the previously made selections.

[Conk]

Pacace has the solution that I would use if I weren't using Knockout, which I mostly do use.
Another way is to use the Magic eraser tool. It allows you to sample the color from around the subject and remove it. Personally I don't use this method as I find it difficult if there is too much similarity between the subject and the area I'm trying to remove. I know that it is just a learning curve problem and that if I knew how to properly do it I would get much better results.

[RJCONKLIN]

thank you both for your help.

[chris.bailey]

Another, though equally tedious option is to block erase close to the piece you want to keep and slowly go down a brush size until you are erasing a couple of pixels at a time. No real easy option in CS unless the subject is taken against a plain background.

[dtrayers]

Here are some tutorials for extracting part of an image:

Scroll down to the Extracting Images part:
http://www.russellbrown.com/body.html

Here's a pdf tutorial on the extract tool:
http://www.adobeevangelists.com/pdfs/photoshop/tipsandtricks/Extract.pdf

Here's one more:
http://www.gurusnetwork.com/tutorials/photoshop/replacebg.html