In a method and system for matting a foreground object F having an opacity α constrained by associating a characteristic with selected pixels in an image having a background B, weights are determined for all edges of neighboring pixels for the image and used to build a Laplacian matrix L. The equation α is solved where α=arg min αT Lα s.t.αi=si, ∀iεS, S is the group of selected pixels, and si is the value indicated by the associated characteristic. The equation Ii=αiFi+(1−αi)Bi is solved for F and B with additional smoothness assumptions on F and B; after which the foreground object F may be composited on a selected background B′ that may be the original background B or may be a different background, thus allowing foreground features to be extracted from the original image and copied to a different background.