Image Editing: Stripping out background

[Lord MJ]

For anyone that has worked with Photoshop, Paintshop of Fireworks.

I have some pictures. I want to strip out the person from the picture and it's background. and pasted it to a plain white background.

The pictures were taken using a digital camera.

Example: I have a person standing against a gray wall, I want to strip the person out, and paste it to a plain white background.

Does anyone know who to do this without to much of a hassle?

[Zac Naloen]

The magic wand tool is the best way to do it.

[salm]

If the Background contrasts sufficiently from the person then the magic wand selection tool is the way to go, or the select by color tool in the selection drop down menu.

If this doesn´t work you need to select it by hand with the polygon lasso selection tool.
After selecting the person it sometimes makes sense to make the selection soft by going to the selection drop down menu and then soft selection. give it a value of 1 or 2 pixels.

Then copy and paste.

[Drooling Iguana]

I'm not sure about Photoshop, but in The Gimp there's an option to select sections of an image by colour. Just use that option and set the threshold high enough to select the wall without selecting any part of the person you want to cut out, hit the "invert" button and copy/paste.

[salm]

Actually it depends. Do you need it to be very accurate or not?If you need it accurate the "select by color" and the "magic wand" tend to give you crapy results. I´d recomend doing it by hand then.