- [Glyn] Hi folks, Glyn here
and in this video, I wanna show you a really quick way
to remove those really annoying halos,
when you do selections and cut outs in Photoshop.
Alright, so on screen you can see the final retouch picture
of my friend, Dave Clayton,
who wanted to be made to look
like the guy, Carl from Pixar's movie Up,
the actual background here was drawn
by our friend Aaron Blaise, who's a digital artist,
I'll put details of Aaron
in the description part of this video,
but if we come over to here,
here you can see the picture of Dave
still on the original background,
but I've actually done all of the retouching in Photoshop
to make him look as best as I can
like the character Carl from Up,
now if I zoom in, you'll see
that you can actually just about make out
the marching ants selection going all the way
around Dave's body and his head,
I've made a selection here using
the Quick Selection tool in Photoshop
and then refine-edged, to kind of finesse that
to make sure I pick up all the little stray hairs,
obviously the updated version is now called Select and Mask.
Now let's just zoom out by double-clicking the Hand tool.
Now when we have the actual marching ants selection active,
best practise when we're actually doing a cut out,
rather than dragging off the picture,
is to actually use a Layer Mask,
so with the marching ants selection,
you can see going around Dave,
I'm gonna come down to the bottom of the Layers panel
and click on the Layer Mask,
now then when I do that, you'll notice
that we get this transparent area around Dave,
this is kind of faking a cut out really,
the background is still there,
in fact if we go over to the Layer Mask,
hold down the Alt on PC or Option
and you can click on the Layer Mask,
we can actually see it,
the white area is what we can see, which is obviously Dave,
the black area here is the background,
the original background, but it's been hidden
behind this black part on the Layer Mask,
now the advantage of doing cut outs on Layer Masks
is if, for example, let's just say
that I'd maybe made the selection of Dave and missed a part,
just like this little bit on his leg here,
I could then come with a brush, paint with white,
which will reveal parts, black conceals, white reveals,
if by paint with white now,
I can actually paint back in the bit that I missed,
had I just dragged off Dave from the background,
you would not be able to do this, so using the Layer Mask
is an incredibly flexible way to work,
but that's not the real point of this tutorial,
now that we've actually done the cut out,
what I'm going to do just to illustrate this
is to add a layer beneath Dave,
to do it beneath, I'm gonna hold down
the Control key on PC, Command key on Mac
and click on the New Layer icon
at the bottom of the Layers panel
and then I'm gonna fill that with black,
so I'm gonna hold down my Alt key
and then Backspace to fill with black
and when we zoom in now, going around the outside of Dave,
you may have experienced this as well
with cut outs, that you do, you can see this kind of outline
going around him, it's kind of like a halo
and that is really parts of the background,
you're not gonna really ever get this
when you use something like the Pen tool,
because it is incredibly accurate,
if you wanna know how to use the Pen tool,
just click on the little card
that's appearing at the top of the screen just about now,
but when you're using other techniques in Photoshop,
you may experience this halo, it can be annoying,
but it's incredibly quick and easy to fix.
I wanna show you how we do that,
let's just double-click on the Hand tool to zoom back out.
Now, what were going to do over in the Layers panel,
click on the Layer Mask to make it active
and now you can see we've got this kind of frame
going around the Layer Mask,
then I'm gonna press L on the keyboard to get my Lasso tool
and all I'm going to do is draw around Dave,
so I'm not making an accurate selection,
I'm just basically telling Photoshop only to look
in the area within this selection,
now I'm not gonna go over his hair,
'cause we haven't got a halo on the hair,
it's mainly on his body, so I'm just gonna draw
straight across to join that selection together,
so now you can see,
we've got the marching ants going around Dave's body,
so Photoshop now will only really concentrate
on this particular area,
now bear in mind I am actually active on the Layer Mask,
what I'm going to do now is go to Filter,
Blur and Gaussian Blur and this is a really important step,
if you don't do this, when we finally get rid of that halo,
it's gonna look really obvious that you've done it,
it's gonna look very, very sharp outline around Dave
and we want it to kind of blend in,
so we need to just blur the outside a little bit,
now you only need to add a small pixel radius,
one is perfectly enough and we'll just click OK,
once we've done that, all we're going to do then
is go to the Image menu at the top of the screen,
Adjustments and then we're gonna choose Levels,
now we're not gonna choose a Levels Adjustment Layer
from over here on the right-hand side,
we're just gonna go to the Image menu,
Adjustments and then Levels
and then all we're going to do is go into the black point
in the far left-hand side of the histogram
and start to drag it over to the right-hand side,
but before I do that, let me just zoom in,
so we can actually see what this is going to do,
so concentrate here, where we can see the halo
going around parts of Dave,
now as I click on this black point,
I start to bring it into the middle,
you'll start to notice that eventually
that halo is going to completely disappear,
just like it has now, so this is before we move it,
this is after we move it, before and after,
so it's a really quick way of actually removing the halo,
but what are we actually doing there,
now that we've done it?
Let's just show you what we're actually accomplishing here.
Let's just go back and we'll cancel that
and I'm actually gonna go to the view of the Layer Mask,
so again I'm gonna hold down the Alt key,
click on the Layer Mask,
so we get the Layer Mask in view,
then I'm gonna go back to the Image menu,
choose Adjustments and then Levels
and this is purely to show you what we're doing,
let's just zoom in,
keep an eye on this black area, where it joins the white,
now just like before, to get rid of the halo,
what we did was we clicked on this black point
and then we dragged inwards, can you see it moving?
Back before, after, there's before, there's after,
before and after, so basically what we're doing is
when we click on this black point
and drag it inwards to the middle and beyond
actually heading towards the white area,
we're actually making the black area grow and as it grows,
it covers even more of the picture, which is obviously Dave,
it's already hiding the background, if we add more black,
it's gonna start creeping over Dave,
as it creeps over Dave, it creeps over that halo,
so let's just go back there one more time,
let's go back to the normal view,
get those levels adjustment, get that black point here,
drag it across, so the actual black part of the mask
grows even more and starts to go over Dave,
now you don't wanna go all the way over,
'cause you'll make him shrink,
just drag it over just enough, until the halo's disappeared
and then you're all done and now actually you can see,
it sort of blends in really well
purely because we did that very, very small
amount of blur at the very start,
so we click OK, double-click on the Hand tool
and then we can just go Command or Control D to deselect
and then go on and carry on working on our cut out,
but without the halo.
So that's all we've got for you,
just a very, very quick video,
the reason I've put this one together
was I'm always being asked,
"How can I get rid of that halo?"
I have recorded it in previous videos,
but it's aways buried way down deep into the video,
so I thought I'd just put this one together
purely concentrating on that one particular technique,
so that's all for now, I shall leave you this trailer
and I'll see you next time.
Hi folks, Glyn here just to remind you
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