Hi. Welcome back to the photoshoptrainingchannel.com. I'm Jesús Ramirez. In this video, you will
learn how to mask and cut out fur from a difficult background in Photoshop.
This tutorial is a request from a PTC viewer, João Farro from Portugal, and he sent this
photo of his cat, asking how to remove the background.
This image is not a very good quality, and it is shot up against a busy background, which
makes it difficult to select. But it's the perfect image for today's tutorial.
In this video, you will learn three techniques that will help you cut out fur or hair from
images with difficult backgrounds. First, you will learn how to customize a brush in
Photoshop to help you create the illusion of fur as you paint on the Layer Mask. Then
you will learn how to use the clone stamp tool to hide imperfections that you create
when paining on your mask. And finally, you will learn how to paint in strands of fur
and hair in areas that would be too difficult to mask. And actually, that's the whole point
of this tutorial. The secret to masking fur on difficult-to-select images is to painting
the fur on the mask yourself, then to paint in strands of fur when necessary.
If you want to follow along with this image, then check out the link below in the description.
Also, don't forget to check out all my masking tutorials here on YouTube. I created a playlist
where you can watch them all. The link is down below in the description. Okay, let's
get started. The first step is to make a selection out
of your cat. You can use any tool that you want. Probably the easiest way of making a
selection out of something like this is by using the quick selection tool and make sure
that the layer is selected, and you can click and drag to select the cat. Or in new versions
of Photoshop, you can click on the select subject button. Press okay to discard my old
selection, and Adobe Sensei, Photoshop's artificial intelligence, will analyze the image and make
a selection out of whatever it thinks the main subject is.
In this case, it does a really good job. The only thing I need to do is deselect some areas,
like this area under his paw. So I'm going to hold Alt on Windows, Option on the Mac,
and I'm going to click and drag to subtract, and click and drag on areas that I do want
to keep. The selection doesn't need to be perfect, but you need to select the edges
of the cat. I'm going to deselect the fur and the whiskers here because I'm going to
paint those in later, and I just want the edges right there. Looks like it missed part
of his head here, so I'm going to click and drag to add that in. His ears and the side
of his head here. Overall, this selection looks pretty good,
so what I'm going to do now is simply click on the Layer Mask icon in the layers panel
to make a mask out of that selection. So anything that was not selected will now be invisible.
Notice that the edges of the mask are a little jagged, and that's okay. I'm not going to
worry about it because I'm going to use a custom brush to paint those in.
Next, select the brush tool. And we're going to select a brush that will mimic fur. Click
on this down-pointing arrow. If you're in an older version of Photoshop, you will not
need to do this step. If you're in Photoshop CC, you will need to bring back an old brush
that is no longer available through the brushes panel, but I think it's a very useful brush
to have. To bring back the old brushes, click on the
gear icon and select legacy brushes. Press okay. In the brushes panel, you will see a
new folder titled legacy brushes, and this folder will contain the brushes that were
found in previous versions of Photoshop. Open the legacy brushes folder, and under default
brushes, look for a brush titled dune grass. In older versions of Photoshop, you can just
click on this down-pointing arrow and find the brush. Scroll down until you find the
brush. This is it here. Dune grass. Click on it to select it, and actually, this brush
was created by Photoshop legend, Bert Monroy, who I consider to be the greatest Photoshop
artist of all time and an excellent instructor. Bert co-wrote the very first book on Photoshop,
and he is Photoshop user number eight, which means that only seven people in the world
have been using Photoshop longer than he has. But, anyway, Bert made this brush, and it's
perfect for masking fur. Before we actually start working on the mask, I will create a
background layer so that you can see what we're doing. Click on the new layer icon.
Actually, I'll use a solid fill layer, so go into the adjustment layer icon and select
solid color. From the color picker, select any color that you want. I'll choose a dark
gray, and I'll press okay. Then, I'll drag the color fill layer below the cat layer.
Notice that the solid fill layer replaced the blank layer, so I need to create a new
blank layer. I'll click on the cat layer and then click on the new layer icon. Make sure
that your foreground color is black. You can click on the default colors icon to make your
foreground color black and your background color white.
Then, I'll paint with the dune grass brush, and you'll see that this brush paints with
a combination of your foreground and background colors. And that's not what we want. So I'll
open the brush settings by clicking on this icon, and I'll disable the color dynamics
checkbox so that I can paint with a single color and not a combination between the foreground
and background colors. Also, I will change the angle jitter control
to direction, which will make the angle of the brush marks the direction of the brush
stroke. What that means is that when I paint from left to right, the thicker parts of the
grass will be at the bottom and the thinner parts on top. If I paint from right to left,
the thicker parts will be on top and the thinner at the bottom. This will make it easier to
paint alongside the edge of the cat, and always keep the thinner parts on top.
I'm going to click on the double arrow icon to close the brush settings panel. Then, I'll
drag this layer to the trash icon because I don't need it anymore. We're now going to
paint on the Layer Mask with this customized dune grass brush. So I'll click on the Layer
Mask thumbnail to activate it. Then, I'll tap the Z key on the keyboard and I'll zoom
into this part of the cat. I'll select the brush tool and make sure that white is my
foreground color, and I'll start painting along the edge of the cat on the mask.
I think that those brush strokes are a little too big, so I'm going to press Ctrl Z, Command
Z, to undo, and I'll tap on the left bracket key on the keyboard to make my brush smaller
and I'll try again. The fur is looking much better now. I think this looks pretty good.
And notice now that I'm just painting on the edge of the cat, just trying to get some fur,
and that makes it a lot more realistic than if I were trying to select it, because trying
to select the fur that's on this low quality image on this really busy background will
be extremely difficult and it wouldn't look good at all. So it's better to just fake the
fur by painting it in. So I'm painting in these edges.
And then you can use the space bar to pan and just continue painting. And if you get
to an area like on the top of his head or where you would like the fur to actually go
the other way, so notice that the fur is leaning towards the right, if you wanted the fur to
lean towards the left, all you have to do is click on this icon and under brush tip,
click on flip X. And when I paint from left to right, notice that the fur now is leaning
to the other side. I'm going to uncheck flip X, click on the double sided arrow to collapse
the panel, and I'll hold the space bar and pan down. And I'll continue painting on the
edge of the mask. In this tutorial, I'm not going to paint around
the entire mask to keep the video short, but I do want to show a specific example under
his paw. I'll click on the brush settings icon. Then, I'll click on flip X and collapse
the panel, and I'll start painting to reveal some of the fur under his paw. And you'll
notice that you start revealing blue parts and the orange parts, and that's because that's
what you have in the background. You can disable the Layer Mask by holding Shift, and clicking
on the Layer Mask thumbnail, and you'll see the background.
To fix this issue, we'll use a new layer where we're going to clone pixels from the original
layer. Let me show you how that works. I'm going to click on a the new layer icon to
create a new layer, and I'll call it color/texture. And I'm going to clip it to the layer below
by pressing Ctrl Alt G, Command Option G on the Mac. And what this allows me to do is
to paint on that layer but only in the areas that are visible. See that? See how I'm painting
and it's only painting on the actual cat, not anywhere else? So I'm going to use the
clipping mask to confine the new pixels that I paint to the cat. And I'm going to use the
clone stamp tool to paint pixels in. The clone stamp tool allows me to copy pixels from one
area and paint them in another. To select what areas to sample, in order words,
to copy from, hold Alt on Windows, Option on the Mac, and click. Then, start painting
over the areas that you would like to fix. You can keep resampling new areas as you paint.
Remember, the keyboard shortcut is Alt on Windows, Option on the Mac. I'm going to double
click on the hand tool to fit the image to screen. Then, I'll disable the layer by clicking
on the eye icon, so that you can see the before and the after. You can then continue doing
the same all around the cat. The next trick that I want to show you will
help you with images that have a shallow depth of field, where parts of your main subject
are blurry, like the paw on the right side of the image. First, I'll select the brush
tool. I'll then enable the cat layer and bring up the brush settings to uncheck flip X. I'll
collapse the panel and I'll make sure that my mask is enabled by clicking on the Layer
Mask thumbnail, and I'll paint with white to reveal the fur on his paw.
As I mentioned before, his paw is out of focus. It's blurry. So we need to replicate that
on the mask. Make sure that the mask is active. Then, select the blur tool from the toolbar
and paint on the mask to blur the fur. This makes the fur look more realistic. The next
tip on masking fur that I want to show you deals with painting in fur that is just too
difficult to select, like his whiskers and the long hair coming out of his ears. We will
paint these fur details in a new layer. Click on the new layer icon and call it painted
fur. And there's a lot of ways of doing it, but the best way of doing it is by using the
brush tool, and if you have a Wacom tablet this is easier. So, so far, I've been using
my mouse, but this effect is much easier when you have a Wacom tablet, because you can select
any brush. The brush really doesn't matter. So I'm just going to select one of these round
brushes, like the hard, round brush, set the size to 3 pixels, close the panel, and paint.
And this looks almost like hair. But if you have a Wacom tablet, open the brush
settings, and click on shape dynamics. Under size jitter, change the control to pen pressure.
Now, when I paint, notice that where you start is thicker, and where you end is thinner.
So that'll help you create the illusion of hair. If you don't have a Wacom tablet, change
the control to fade, then increase the fade to 100. So when you paint, it sort of creates
that effect. It won't be as good as the Wacom tablet, but you can get similar results.
Also, if you want the longer brush stroke, increase the minimum diameter. But for me,
I'll switch the control back to pan pressure. I'm going to close the brush settings panel
and undo these brush strokes. And with the brush tool active, you can hold Alt on Windows,
Option on the Mac, to temporarily switch over into the eyedropper tool and you can select
a color. I'm going to select the color of the whiskers and I'm going to paint those
in by hand. And I think you get the idea. I can continue painting the other ones, but
for the sake of time, I'm just going to move up to another area like the ear, and I'm going
to select the color of the hairs that are found on his ear, and I can just start painting
in those strands of hair much like they are in the real photo. Let me enable those back
in and you can see what they look like. And I can just keep painting those in. Obviously
I'm going fairly quickly, but that is the idea. To paint in the strands of hair when
necessary. I'm going to double click on the hand tool
and what I'm going to do now is just show you an image that I've worked on with a little
more time. I spent about 30 minutes using the same techniques on that same image, and
these are my results. You can see the Layer Mask with the brush strokes along the edge
of the cat, using that grass brush. Then I have a color texture layer, where I clone
in pixels that are similar to the edges, to remove that extra color from the background.
And this is the fur that I painted in using the brush tool.
Again, when you're working on an image with a busy background, it's sometimes better to
paint in the mask and details by hand. If you haven't watched my tutorial on masking
hair from a busy background, then check it out. I show how to create a custom brush so
that you can easily paint in strands of hair. I'll place a link right below in the description.
Watch it right after this tutorial. Also, if this is your first time at the Photoshop
Training Channel, then don't forget to click on the subscribe and notification buttons.
Thank you so much for watching. I'll talk to you again in the next tutorial.