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Hey all, found an old tutorial pdf, from the old think site i think called Grass_tutorial.pdf, found here:

http://gallery.realistic-design.com/tut ... torial.pdf

Being a bit of a photoshop noob I'm having a bit of trouble with the editing the image part, can anyone recommend a training course(online or dvd) that would go into better detail, really need to watch someone do it.I pullled a fern branch off a friends tree fern (with her permission ) and scanned the whole thing but I can't say I'm looking forward to using the eraser on all the images and editing with colour range isn't working that great.

Appreciate any help

On that fern leaf photo, did you use a solid color background? It helps so you can easily "cut out" the BG in PS.

Hey Brian, took photos, with the back of a poster behind it but I actually pulled the plant apart and scanned every leaf, so its white, but there is a shadow.

Cheers

Brett

If you want to get a nice clean edge, some manual work is necessary You could try the lasso tool, or the magic lasso tool (has a little magnet icon in it), which will follow the edge of your object based on a sensitivity you can set. But I like to use the path tool and create a path around the object, usually zoomed in a lot on the photo. When using the path tool to create the path, don't fiddle with the bezier curves much to make the path follow the outline, instead just add as many points as you want. Press the Space bar when zoomed in on the photo (which activates the hand tool) to move around in the photo, release space bar and you can continue adding points to the path. Once you've created a path all around the object, and clicked the first point in the path, which closes the path, open the Paths palette (Window>Paths), right click on it and choose make selection. Then just CtrlC, CtrlV to copy paste the selection into a new layer.
If some of this isn't clear do a search for a "cut-out" Path tool tutorial.

Thanks Mihai, your advice is always good, appreciate it, will save me a lot of time I know it

Great method, Mihai!