The Hard Way: Eliza's Necklace

I don't care for removing things from their backgrounds, as I'm sure I previously mentioned.
This is what you'd call the worst case scenario.
There are endless varieties of ways to separate one object from another. There is Hue, Saturation, and Brightness - at least one of these varies in some degree between separate objects. The other 1% of the time, usually the location or the size/shape/texture varies enough.

This time it was medium grays on medium grays... yuck... what a nightmare. I learned something, though - If you keep a steady hand, a layer mask can be fine tuned. Apparently different brushes on a layer mask and a careful stroking of it can get you what you're looking for no matter what. That's a big confidence booster: it proves that anything can be removed from anything. It did take a few hours, though - but probably half that time was spent searching for and attempting other things - and failing.

It's pretty, isn't it? Eliza sent it to me from her phone. Maybe my work's not perfect, but good enough for a source image, and I can always touch it up.

Finding Source Photos

Photoshop without photos sounds kinda ridiculous, does it not?
Well, I don't particularly care for cutting things out. It doesn't matter whether it's with scissors, my dad's xacto knife, my pocketknife... It's really rather tedious to me.

The same thing applies to Photoshop. Whether it be a pen tool or a mask or any of the lassos, I don't particularly like messing with any of it. That's part of my suffering, it seems.
I found a solution that may help me to break this annoyance. I Googled it and found this on YouTube. You can get rid of whites and blacks by using the "blend if:" on the bottom in
blending options/layer styles. Alt-clicking can give you a secondary slider.

Fireworks!!! I have lots of them on my phone from July (of course). This is a neat green one I stuck on a Filter> render> clouds background. While I was in layer styles I gave it a nice outer glow. I love it! It's not a piece of art by its self, but it's an awesome proof-of-concept.

I think I'll be able to take advantage of source images hereafter. I do need to get to where I'm better at finding them or taking them - I don't really like taking pics from the internet - it comes off cliché - and you can't always prevent accidental licensing issues.