Removing Backgrounds - Beginners Photoshop Lesson 1

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Remove backgrounds from around people and objects to put them in other backgrounds or use the people for other things. Three simple methods to remove backgrounds using Adobe Photoshop CS.

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Closed Caption:

hi my name is Jessica quarterly and
we're going to start here the first
lesson of beginners photoshop series AKA
photoshop for dummies
today's lesson is removing backgrounds
from pictures really quickly this is our
website
photoshop help stop blogspot.com we've
got a lot of great resources tutorials a
lot of great places to get ideas get
from brushes for photoshop all right
weapon of choice today is adobe
photoshop CS and we're gonna go ahead
and get started
there's a couple of different methods
you can use to remove backgrounds in
this case we've got a picture of a
person with just a plain grey background
and its really simple just remove a
plain grey or white or one color
background so we'll start here by
duplicating the layer and you'll make
the background copy invisible
we're going to do is go over here to our
background eraser tool you can adjust
the tolerance right now it's set at
twenty-five
I'm just to show you i will move it up
to 78 or so you can see if you click
it's not just going to erase the gray
it's also going to erase the person at
that tolerance so we'll move it back
down to about 25 26
you can adjust the size of your circle
there's a little cross in the middle of
that circle and whatever color that
cross is touching at this tolerance
level is what it's going to erase that
went ahead and erase some of his hair so
we'll take you down just a little lower
ok and you can see wherever the cross
touches
it's going to erase that color it erased
a little bit of hair you can go ahead
and mess around with the tolerance level
until you get it to look how you want
now at this point we can go ahead and
take another picture like a swimming
pool since this guy's got no shirt on
go ahead and make it look like he's at
swimming pool
we will adjust this using the ctrl T
which is the free transform using shift
keep the picture proportional
ok and pictures a little bit blurry
we can find a better quality picture as
you can see we just erase the gray
background so that we can put him in a
different scene or maybe use his picture
some other way
alright next we will use this picture
just to show you another method as you
can see the background is not all one
color so the background eraser tool will
not work it's just going to select you
know little pieces of of the background
at a time
so what we're going to do here is again
duplicate the layer and turn off the
background copy and easiest method i
found to do this is to come up and get
your paintbrush tool make sure that
you're just on a solid round brush of
some size you can adjust the size later
on
come down here to the quick mask tool
and select it and what's going to happen
is you know just the size using the
hotkeys wherever you select is going to
turn kind of a see-through read and what
this does is when you come back here and
select this other I can take the quick
mask off
you can see it selected and it's kind of
weird isn't select where you turned red
it selects the opposite so if I were to
hit delete right now it would delete
everywhere that wasn't red just go ahead
and undo that and go back to the layer
mask and so what we want to do is select
our person here and the neat thing is
people have pretty much everything is
around on a person so you can use this
round brush to select just about
everything and you can adjust the size
and go ahead and zoom in where you need
to to get the small features
it's not going to be perfect but it
doesn't have to be especially if you're
going to shrink the person to fit onto a
smaller smaller picture
it works really well if you get high
quality pictures of a large size to
begin with
so really quickly I'm just going to go
through here and do this and it doesn't
take much time
arm it's going to turn out a lot better
when you do it just because you're
probably going to be taking more time to
get the picture to look the way that you
want it to
and as with everything else it takes
practice it's it's probably not going to
turn out perfect the first time that you
do it now you're not going to be able to
get all the little strands of hair with
this method but you don't have to i'll
show you in a minute you can get the
rest of the little strands of hair for
the big areas you just want to you know
go ahead and select the bigger brush it
it saves time so make sure to get to the
edges of the person and like i said so
far as you can see we've just been using
round brushes
there's no need for square brushes or
anything
if you're going to be using if you're
going to be using a picture where you
want to select something like a square
object
you'll need a different method which i
can show you in a minute off cell
ok
so as you can see we've selected
everything around the person opes
we missed a spot down there
just go ahead and take care of that
really quick
like say it's not perfect but it doesn't
need to be hit delete it will delete
everything around him
if you want to go back and get some of
those little strands of hair
what you want to do is come up and get
this straight line select tool and we
are on the add to selection
nopes
let's go get the - from selection tool
and you can just um because hairs got
some straight edges to it we can just go
through here and if you really want to
find little hairs
you can take the time to go through and
do this
you're not going to get the really fine
hairs with this method and you can get
round edges with this tool to you just
have to do a lot more clicking to get it
ok
zoom out here so we've got our person
and you can either a go ahead and delete
the background or you can come up here
and go to select inverse and it will now
select the person and you can delete him
maybe if you just wanted the background
or you can hit control C and copy them
you know maybe you wanted to paste them
again that and it works the same way
alright so what we'll do is we'll come
get this picture
now that we've copied him and will be
some and always the ctrl T which is the
free transform and hold shift while
you're moving them down to keep in
proportional here since it's got a flat
edge you'll need to mess around with the
colors when you're putting a person on a
background to make it look like the
person isn't like really light and the
background is really dark
we will cover that in another tutorial
though so those are two really simple
methods for two different kinds of
removing two different kinds of
backgrounds
another method that you can use is this
straight line tool say we had a square
object here
or maybe you just want to select his
necklace we just go through here and
click and even though the necklace is
kinda round because it's going around
his neck
you can still get it like its it just
takes a lot more clicking and you'll
need to zoom in if you have to so now
you know we wanted to lead his necklace
for whatever reason you can do that
ok and this was episode 1
how to remove background from pictures
there's a lot of things you can do with
this - very simple methods
make sure to visit visit our website
photoshop hell
oops that blogspot.com thank you