Most people use the magnetic lasso or the polygonal lasso tool when extracting a person or object from a photo. This is good practice when the object has flat edges. However when we are looking to extract a person or even an animal and there is hair involved the extract filter gives you a much better result. As an extreme example we will be extracting hair in Photoshop using the image of bob the dog.

Create a new working area to fit the image you will be working with, go to file and select place prompting you to navigate your desktop for the image. The first tool we will select is the extract tool, find this by navigating to your top menu, select filter then select the extract, in earlier versions of Photoshop this may not be included and you may need to download from the adobe website.

The following tutorial we take you through the steps on how to install Photoshop plugins, on this occasion we will be installing the extract filter.

Select an appropriate brush stroke, this will vary depending on your image, then take the brush around the outside of the image, click on the small bucket fill tool. On the top right of the pallet you are working on select preview, to correct any imperfections select the clean-up tool located on the left, holding down the ALT key click around the imperfection area.

For your new background create a new canvas, place your desired backdrop, then switch back to the dog image, select the move tool, click down on the dog and drag over the background menu tab, this will place the dog on your new canvas with the desired background. To alter the size of the dog image from the top menu select edit and free transform to transform the dog image to a suitable size.