conclusion...
Using Vector Masks to Remove Backgrounds
If you’ve never used vectors or the pen tool in Photoshop, this is going to be a frustrating how to for you. Less seasoned readers may want to learn about the difference between Vectors and Pixels, or brush up on the Pen tool before going forward.
Vector masks are not very different from Layer Masks, except that they use vector primitives to create their Alpha mask channels. To create these vector primitives, we’ll have to use the Pen tool to create a work path we can mask our layer with. Start by creating a copy of your background, as done in the previous method.
Press
to select the Pen tool. Simply draw your shapes around your object as best as you can. Keep to the outside perimeter and ignore any shapes inside the object for now.
Don’t worry about getting every blurry pixel into your work path. Since you’re creating masks and not deleting information, you can consider less to be more. It’s more important to draw vectors that represent the object well—not ones that capture every smeary pixel.
Trace the entire object around and connect your last point to your first one to create an enclosed object. This is absolutely important and vital to the next steps, where we’ll add the holes and gaps within the object.
If your work path is complete and connected to itself as a complete, contiguous shape, you can draw in the little fiddly shapes and gaps that pop up inside the object without problems.
Draw in all the shapes inside the object in the same work path. You should have handsome vector lines around your object similar to these.
Navigate to Layer > Vector Mask > Current Path to create a Vector Mask from your current Work Path. Your active work path will become a Vector mask, and remove the background from your object with no additional steps!
From there, you can do any absurd thing to your image you care to, changing backgrounds and scaling your vector object to all manner of ridiculous sizes. Have fun working with layer masks and removing those complex backgrounds!
Thanks to Eric Z Goodnight for this