I am aware that Krita is not an image editor in first place but I was keen to see how well it works
update 2022-01-10:
One can easily see that the black background reveals every little blooper in the mask.
2022-01-09
This is the source:
One can easily see that the black background reveals every little blooper in the mask.
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Nice experiment…
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I use krita for KPOP banners, cupsleeve designs, etc. for my friends fan event.
Most of the time it was to do this remove background before i transfer it to inkscape for layout. It works quite well. I mostly use transparency mask and a soft edge brush. It works really well.
Neat experiment 
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First, hello Jeremiah. Secondly which tool did you use? Nice job.
Hello Sineater
Ey good new year btw :-).
I did it by using different adjustment mask through a couple of steps. The goal was to create the best possible contrast between foreground and background. I then took the layer which provided the best result of that and converted it to a transparency mask. This is called highpass filtering.
Tutorial see here (it is done in Gimp but it’s the same process): Remove the background from hair in GIMP - tutorial (Cut out hair) - YouTube
I tried allready again, see above.
Cheers
Jeremiah
I think it is based on what it is called highpass filtering.
Her hair should be the only hard part. I can test it out too. I am sorry to say but I am more of a post production guy than a illustrator. Hopefully this year I will be a real illustrator.
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That would interesting and hope you can give it a try soon. I am sure it can be done a lot better with the right expertise.
Cheers
Jeremiah
Here is my attempt. I used to have to do stuff like this at my last job, so these background removals are always fun challenges. I think @Jeremiah has the right approach on trying to create a mask with the foreground/background first. Then applying that as a transparency mask. Here is my starting mask…and then I later tweaked the hair mask to get the final results.
I like using strong colors in the background for these tests. I think it can really highlight issues with transparency. Sometimes black or white backgrounds sometimes mask transparency issues with complex hair details like this.
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I did the best I could but there is just too much noise with the jpg compression and small file dimensions, this make her hair strands just get lost into the void 
if I had a bit more space inside I think I could clean this up better and much faster.
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Hi Scott
What an honour that you, one of the developers, has joyned in.
The details in the hair part of your mask are very good.
I think too that it is lots of fun to tweak around with this.
Did you separate the channels in your aproach to get such a good result?
Cheers
Jeremiah
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Thanks for joyning in.
It looks great too. I am amazed about your skills.
Afterwards I tried twice again and they where a bit better but none of them came close to yours and scotts.
Cheers
Jeremiah
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You did a good job picking up all the fly-away hair on her. I mostly went by the value when making the mask. Doing it by color channel might have given me a better mask like yours. This was pretty hard since the hair goes from dark to light. There were areas there were pretty hard to capture.
For the hard ends on some of the fly away hair, I usually take an airbrush and slightly fade them out with the mask. That makes them look a bit more natural and blend in the background better.
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I caught those flying hairs by hand actually, but it is no way to live I would never mask like this for footage. I just used my brushes. Color masks is something I never managed to do inside Krita I was looking into how to do that right now again to se if something changed since last time. For me color selection tools here are still unusable and the channels docker is still useless beyond display. And this image was too compressed for a filter alone if it was the original file it would go alot smoother probably. Hair masking is always a good exercise.
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Soo, this is my last attempt bevore I get addicted to it 
This time I used a crosschannel adjustement. I got that result by chance since I don’t know how the crosschannel tool realy works.
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I see. I guess you have access to a specialized photoediting tool. Can you say if the result would be much better?
well I learnt how to do these things with Photoshop, then Nuke, After effects and now I have to learn it in Davinci Resolve that I think rivals Nuke I think. I think it would be more clean but would eat a bit more hair in the process but would look more natural still, especially the hair section the body even vectors would suffice.
But Nuke is just so amazing. doing these things in Krita is like being in the stone age almost.
But sometimes brush painting the mask is needed and Krita would be my choice for that due to the brushes and animation timeline.
It just needs a tool or two to actually work properly with in Krita to do it faster and not be there making everything by hand.
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I see. I don’t know any of the apps you mentioned. Well I think it is still pretty impressive that the painting app Krita handles this so good. I guess all these tools do also follow different ideologies.
This is something I wanted to address, but I would like to have another programmer to take a look at @tiar edited code of mine if @tiar has kept it somewhere in a branch. Basically, foreground extraction is 50% done except for the underlying algorithm failing to work. The rest is outside my skill-range.
@scruffydux made a tutorial for background removal may be you can explore the options mentioned in the video too
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well that is good to start making masks. did not know there was a threshhold filter now. that is nice.