Gimp magic wand example for magazine cover

Hello,
d’art et de culture is the cultural magazine of Monaco. I was lucky enough to contribute to the cover of issue number 36, taking for subject the in situ work by Stéphanie Lobry,
Below before, and after images :



If you “like” it, then feel free to do so here :slight_smile:

A pdf version of the magazine is available here (for as cheap as 2 € but not for free, sorry)
I should add that I worked on this for free and am not affiliated to the editors so would’nt want this to be considered a spam as I won’t benefit from the magazines’ sales. But I respect the editor’s work that I think does deserve some contribution. (the magazine is distributed for free in its print version).

Technically, it was one of the worse situations for such clipping operations, with a lot of noise (that I had to add back to the replacement background for better merging) and so many various shades. That’s why I chose the “magic wand” tool, one not to underestimate since it allows to make no undesired selection in hidden places despite being more teddious than other methods. Noise made it necessary to use a low threshold!

What do you think… both about the results and the method? do you prefer to use automatic scissors or bezier curve selection with some feathering?