Hi! Welcome back to the PhotoshoPtrainingChannel.com.
I'm Jesus Ramirez.
In this video I'm going to show you my method for removing a background from a photo in
Photoshop.
This will be a crash course on the Select And Mask workspace.
You'll learn everything that you need to know about how this amazing tool works, and you'll
also learn my two-step method for making better cutouts.
I think that you really will enjoy it and you will learn a lot.
Before we get started, I would like to answer a few comments that I know will come through.
First, I'm working with the latest Photoshop release.
Some of the features shown in this video will not be available to older versions, including CS6,
but the main part of this video, my two-step method, is still relevant to older versions of Photoshop.
You will not have access to the Select And Mask workspace, but you will be able to follow
along with the adjust edge sliders in the refine edge dialog box.
Also, something else that I would like to address before we start, I know I'll get comments
about it, yes, this is an image with a solid background, which makes it easier to mask,
and there's two reasons why instructors use images like this one.
First, it makes it easier to teach the concepts without spending too much time on things that
wouldn't be relevant to other photos.
And second, that's the way that we, as professionals, work.
We prefer to use images with solid backgrounds because they give us much better results.
It's the same reason why a movie director uses a green screen.
It makes it easier to mask the actors in post-production and it gives them better results.
I understand that sometimes, you may have to work with images that have a busy background,
and in those situations, you have to apply different techniques to get good results.
But don't worry, I have an advanced video that describes a few methods that you can
use in situations like that.
The link to that video is below, in the description.
The goal of this video is to teach you how the Select And Mask workspace works and how
to get better results by using a two-step method.
You can follow along with the image I'm using if you like.
The tutorial image link is below, in the description.
Okay, let's jump right into the tutorial.
You can make a selection with any of the selection tools if you like, but these days, I find
it easier to just start my selection right from within the Select And Mask workspace.
I can bring it up by selecting any of the selection tools, for example, the quick selection
tool, and then clicking on the "Select And Mask" button in the options bar.
First, make sure that your view is set to "onion skin.
" You can press the O key on the keyboard.
My transparency is set to 50%, and what onion skinning does is sh- show the selected pixels
at full opacity and the non-selected pixels at whatever percentage you set under transparency.
In this case, 50%, which is why our model is not fully visible.
To select them, you could use the quick selection tool and click and drag over him, but in new
versions of Photoshop, there's a much faster way of doing this.
You can simply click on the "Select subject" button and Photoshop will use machine learning
technology, the artificial intelligence known as Adobe Sensei, to select the main subject
of the photo automatically.
The resulting selection is not perfect but it is a great starting point.
A quick side-note: if you're working with a photo with multiple people and you would
like to select just one person, what you can do instead is enable the object selection
tool from the tool bar, set the mode to lasso and freehand a loose selection over the person
that you would like to select.
When you release, Photoshop will use the same artificial intelligence to select the main
subject, but it will only look in the areas that you defined with the object selection tool.
Now that we've selected our main subject, notice that he's visible at 100% opacity,
indicating that he's selected.
To better see the edges of our selection, change the view to on white.
make sure that you set the opacity to 100%.
That way, the transparent areas become white.
Next, we will work on fine-tuning the edges of our selection with the sliders in the global refinements.
Again, these sliders are also available in the old Refine Edge dialog box in Photoshop CS6.
You can start by pressing the Z key on the keyboard to access the zoom tool so that you
can zoom into this area to see how the following adjustments will affect the edge.
Before we start, I want to make it clear that all the adjustments that we are going to make
in this first step are meant for the edges around the body and not his hair.
I'm going to disregard his hair entirely and we will come back to it in the next step.
So let's take a look at the edges around his body and how we can improve them.
Oftentimes, the selections that you create with the quick selection tool or the artificial
intelligence will be jagged, and you can smooth them out by using the smooth slider.
Simply drag the smooth slider to the right, and notice how the edges in the selection
are smoothed out.
The next slider is the feather slider.
This slider blurs the edges of the mask.
We don't need to do that for this image, so I'll leave it at zero.
You can also make the mask edges sharper by adding contrast, which will make the darker
pixels darker and the brighter pixels brighter on the mask, not the actual image.
To better understand what I mean by that, I'll go into the black and white view, which
is a representation of the mask.
White reveals and black conceals.
In other words, the black areas are hidden and the white areas are visible.
The different shades of gray give you different levels of opacity.
When I increase the contrast again, you can now see that this slider makes some pixels
darker and some lighter, which creates edge sharpness.
Like most of these adjustments, you don't want to push the slider too far.
Next, you can adjust the shift edge slider, which pushes the mask in or out.
Usually, you want to contract the mask to hide haloes or fringing.
Those are the white or colored edges that you see on cutouts sometimes.
Once the edges are looking the way that you want, we can move into the next step, but
before we do so, I want to show you why we're not going to adjust his hair on this first step.
I'll select the unwhite view again, then I'll zoom out and use the hand tool to pan and
I'll select the refine edge brush tool and click and drag over his hair.
And I'll explain how this tool works in a moment.
Notice that Photoshop is also applying those global edge refinement adjustments to his hair.
We were using those adjustments to optimize the edges around his body, but the edges around
his hair are completely different,
so the resulting edge around the hair is never really the best one.
Instead, what I recommend that you do is apply a second adjustment that only deals with his hair.
Let me show you how to do that.
I'll press Ctrl Z on Windows, Command Z on the Mac.
then, you can go into your output settings and make sure that you have "Layer mask" selected
from the output [inaudible] drop-down and press "Okay.
" Photoshop will then apply the global refinement [inaudible] selection and create a layer mask.
Now you can go back and work on the model's hair.
You can click on the layer mask thumbnail,
and from the properties panel, you can click on "Select and mask."
I'll select the refine edge tool again and do a similar adjustment to what I just made.
Compared to the previous example,
it's doing a much better on extracting the hair now.
See that?
The reason is that I no longer have any of the global refinements applied, and
that's what most people overlook.
Most people do all of this in just one step.
Let me know in the comments if that's what you've seen in the past, or if you've seen
other people do two steps as well.
Now I want to show you what this tool is doing behind the scenes.
That way, you understand how it works so that you can take full advantage of it.
I'm going to press Ctrl Z on Windows, Command Z on the Mac, to undo.
So what is the refine edge tool actually doing? If I click on "show edges," nothing happens,
right? We have a blank screen.
But, if I increase the edge radius, you can see the edges getting thicker by the number
of pixels that the slider controls.
This edge is where the refinement occurs.
Currently, it's a 70-pixel edge, where Photoshop looks for hair and other fine elements to
make an extraction.
If I click on "smart radius," notice that the edge is no longer 70 pixels all around.
Some areas are thinner and other areas are thicker.
The smart radius changes the edge width, depending on the content of the image.
In this case, the global edge refinement doesn't give me the best results.
I think that we can do much better by manually setting the edge refinement area.
I'll disable the smart radius and set the edge radius to one pixel so that we can see
where the mask edge is.
With the refine edge tool, you can now paint over your subject's hair, and what you're
really doing is manually painting the edge where the refinement occurs.
See how I just painted that edge there? That's what the refinement edge tool does.
It helps you redefine the edge detection area.
When you uncheck "show edge," notice what the refine edge tool did there.
It extracted the hair.
All you're doing when you're using the refine edge tool is telling Photoshop where to look
to make that edge refinement.
I'll click on the "show edge" box again and I'll continue painting.
Just for the purposes of demonstration,
I'll increase the edge detection radius and I'll uncheck "show edge. " See how it starts damaging the edges on his body? I don't want any of that, so I'm
going to bring the radius back down to zero because I don't want any adjustment over the
edges of his body.
We took care of those edges already in the previous everything.
Now that we've extracted the hair, you can fine-tune it with the brush tool.
You can select the brush tool from the tool bar and paint over the areas that were hidden
that should not have been hidden, like the highlights on his hair.
You can then subtract from the selection by clicking on this button with the minus icon
and paint over the areas that should not have been selected.
In this case, I don't need to worry about that, so I'm just going to press OK.
And this is our mask.
Next, I'm going to show you the third step that I take in making selections and masks
in Photoshop.
So that you can see what I'm doing a little bit better, I'm going to create a solid color
fill layer and I'll set it to white and I'll click-and-drag it below the model layer so
that you can see the mask edges better.
Then, I'll click on the layer mask thumbnail to select it.
You can see the white outline around it.
And I'm going to show you how you can remove fringing or edge haloes.
There's not a lot of fringing or edge haloes going on in this mask, but that's okay.
You'll still see how this works and you can use it on your images.
So again, with the layer mask thumbnail selected, I can go into filter, other and I can select
"minimum.
" The minimum filter minimizes a mask based by a radius of pixels.
In this case, I have 1.
7, but if I click-and-drag and do a larger radius, you'll see that the mask now is contracted
by 84.1 pixels.
So I'm pushing the mask in.
There's also an algorithm that determines what to preserve: roundness or squareness.
Watch that.
When I change this to squareness, I get more straight edges on my mask.
That necessarily doesn't look good, so I'll just change it back to roundness because we're
dealing with a person which has a lot of round edges and not many straight edges.
What I'll do now is simply reduce the radius to something more manageable.
Maybe I can do a radius of one pixel to push the mask in one pixel
and I can press OK. And from this point, I'm ready to place this
image over another background.
I have a tutorial on how to do that.
The link to it is below, in the description.
Also, if you're working with a photo with a busy background, don't forget to watch my
video on advanced hair masking.
The link is also in the description.
Let me know in the comments what you think about this two-step method and the minimum
and maximum filter.
I'd love to get your thoughts on it.
And if you enjoy the video,
make sure that you click on that "Like" button now
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Thank you so much for watching.
I'll talk to you again in the next video.