Extraction – it has always been my very least favorite thing to do. I’ve avoided entire projects just because I didn’t want to spend the time extracting a difficult image from its background. The tools provided in CS2 were not bad but I could never quite get the magic eraser or the background eraser to work so I always resorted to drawing a path around the object, turning the path into a selection and then guessing at modifications to the selection to get the edges realistic looking. Yes, CS2 also had the extract filter but it seemed just as laborious as drawing a path, and paths are easier to adjust.
Along comes Photoshop CS3 with the new “quick selection tool” (w) in the toolbar and “refine edges” under the “selection” menu; together these new tools make selections a breeze.
Open your image, grab the quick selection tool and start painting, yes, painting with it in the background color; it finds the edges for you. Use the controls labeled 2 in the picture above to add or subtract from the selection, much like you do with the magic wand tool. You can also change the brush size which has the effect of making the edge detection more sensitive, again, much like changing the tolerance of the magic wand tool except that the quick selection tool is way easier to use.
So, now you’ve got the background selected, go to the “select” menu and choose “refine edges”.
This is where the true magic comes in – this window lets you play with the selection while seeing what that selection will look like once it’s cut out from the rest of the picture. Contract/Expand, Feather and Smooth will be familiar but radius and contrast are new and give you an even greater range of fine-tune control over the edges. You can also change the view mode so that your selection is displayed on a black background, a white background, as a quick mask, a channel or as just a regular selection.
There, that picture was actually a pleasure to extract. It’s not perfect but that whole procedure took me under 2 minutes.
Now what about Illustrator CS3? It’s got some cool new features too. My personal favorites are the eraser tool (I kind of wonder why it took them this long) and the new isolation mode. Neither are glamorous but man are they useful.
Lets start with the eraser, which, likes its name implies, erases. Take any shape and just erase a part of it and suddenly you have separate shapes where your eraser cut across the objects. You could do much the same before using compound paths and the pathfinder tool but the eraser it much faster and more intuitive (although by no means does it replace those other tools).
Sometimes some strange grouping happens which you may have to sort out after cutting across multiple objects – I’m sure there is a method to it but I haven’t used it quite enough to figure it out.
And last but not least, isolation mode. Ever gotten totally frustrated working on a multilayer design because you kept grabbing the wrong piece? Ever wished to God you could alt-click a layer’s visibility like you could in Photoshop to turn all others off, leaving just the one you wanted? Well now you basically can using isolation mode found on your control bar or in the layers pallet menu.
The only peculiarity is that the paths or objects you want to isolate have to be grouped, you can’t just select one object or a few objects and hit isolate. Why, I don’t know. Seems like a bit of a design oversight. Once a group is in isolation mode, everything else becomes washed out looking, your screen gets a blue border and your layers pallet shows only the isolated group.
I don’t totally understand why they don’t just make alt-clicking a layer’s visibility button work like it does in Photoshop, but Illustrator’s isolation mode gives us much the same functionality so thank you Adobe.
ash…
I am a man on a mission to create a world that I will be proud to pass on to my son. I use every tool at my disposal toward this task: words, images, technology, education, relationships. We must act now because the need is great! 
I like the star it’s wicked