First off I fully intend to bring back the Obi commission shrine post later but for now I want to see if I'm able to gain any insight from other people.

The last post that I made was to show the very first steps toward my own Hollow type guy. And I think it went over better than I thought it would. I honestly thought the guy was a disaster, and while the comments received did indicate that it was sub-par they were helpful and hopeful for something really nice.

Since then I have tried every method I know, or have recently learned to mask the guy from the background and the hair from the guy. I have used plugins, tutorials, even asked some people who know what they are doing. But nothing ever works well.

ImageSkill's Background Remover plugin is an amazing utility. And has helped me to remove unwanted objects from an image before. When used on this image however one major problem shows up. The colors are all too similar to each other. And so jagged edges, incomplete masking, or overly masking of areas does occur.

An attempt at the many methods of Journeyman masking have failed. While I am able to seperate many items I can still never get anything truly worth getting.

What really frustrates me are the following two things:
1) Masking is just as much an art as drawing or painting or coloring. None of which I'm good at.
2) So long as the actual shapes don't change, a mask applied to one variant of an image will work on the original. But if this is true, then what changes do I have to make in order to get the best mask?

I truly believe that if it can be seen and distinguished in the photo it can be masked. Which means that masking just needs a method that will work properly. Not a general method obviously, because that doesn't exist and can't exist due to the first condition listed. It's an art, you can't just auto-mask something efficiently with a single-click.

So the question is, what sorts of edits can be made to the image, to allow for the best masks to be made? The colors of many areas (the hair to the face and the background/shadows to the shirt and shadowed skin areas) are too similar and need to be distinguished somehow. Most likely through a combination of images blended properly together to separate out the individual elements.

But how? The number of options, order of the options, and final result possibilities are enormous. What do I need to learn to make the best possible guess at how to approach this image? That's the question that's been bugging me.

If you're curious about this image, go to my profile it's right there. Any suggestions are welcome but this topic is far less asking for help and more just me ranting about my frustrations. It helps me to get them out.

Oh well, if you've made it this far thanks for listening.

And if you're curious as to why I'm sticking with this image despite the frustrations involved, the answer is simple. I paid money at fotolia.com to get a royalty free large image that I can use in any way I see fit. I was dumb enough to get an image I could not use efficiently and now I'm paying for it...again...so I'm determined to figure out a way to use it in the way I want. Wish me luck.