This work attempts to considerably reduce the amount of user effort in the natural image matting problem. The key observation is that the nonlocal principle, introduced to denoise images, can be successfully applied to the alpha matte to obtain sparsity in matte representation, and therefore dramatically reduce the number of pixels a user needs to manually label. We show how to avoid making the user provide redundant and unnecessary input, develop a method for clustering the image pixels for the user to label, and a method to perform high-quality matte extraction. We show that this algorithm is therefore faster, easier, and higher quality than state of the art methods.