Welcome to Printful’s design series, where we’ll show you practical tips that you can
use to create awesome designs for print-on-demand products.
I’ll start off by showing you how to remove the background from an image.
First what you want to do is open Adobe Photoshop and drop an image of your choice into it.
Let’s unlock the layer by pressing once on the lock icon here.
Now we can modify the layer in any way we want.
Photoshop has a lot of ways to remove the background.
Let’s start with the selection tools.
You can find “Selection Tools” by pressing here.
First, let’s choose the “Quick Selection Tool”.
This tool lets you paint over the area that you want to select but sometimes it will add
unnecessary details to the selection.
This can be fixed by changing the size of the selection brush by pressing the bracket
keys on your keyboard.
By holding down the “Alt” key you can remove the unwanted parts from the selection,
and by pressing the “Shift” key you can add to the selection.
You can also switch between these modes in this area here.
Alternatively, you can press “Select Subject” located here, and Photoshop will analyze the
image and select the object for you.
This works well with a minimalistic image, but the tool may select other objects if the
image is very cluttered with different elements busy.
In our case, we still need to tidy up the selection.
Another option is to use the ”Object Selection Tool”.
Using Adobe Sensei machine learning the tool will do the selection for you.
Just drag over the area where the object of interest is located and watch the magic happen.
By zooming in we can see it did a good job of selecting the smallest details.
If the image you’re working with is complex and you need more control over the area you’re
selecting, use the “Pen Tool”.
You can manually draw a selection path by placing anchor points around the object.
Hold the “Alt” key to adjust the curvature of the lines between the anchor points.
If you want to reposition the anchor point, hold down “Ctrl” and move it to the necessary
location.
This will take some time, but there’s a solution to speed up the process.
Let’s head over to the properties tab, it should be located here.
If you can’t see it, go to “Window” and make sure that there’s a checkmark next
to “Properties”.
When the checkmark becomes visible, under “Quick Actions” you’ll see an option
to “Remove the background” and “Select Subject”.
Let’s cover the second option as it can be linked to the “Pen Tool”.
By pressing “Select Subject” we can get the same result as we would by using “Quick
Selection Tool”.
Now with either the Marquee or Selection tool chosen, right-click on the selected area and
press “Make Work Path”.
A new window will show up where you can enter the value for tolerance.
Tolerance determines how many anchor points will be created in the work path of this object.
The lower the number the more anchor points will be created.
I’ll leave the tolerance at the default setting 3.0 and press “OK”.
As you can see we have a complete selection path made in a few clicks.
If you need to make adjustments to it head over to your “Layers” panel and switch
to “Paths”.
Select the “Work Path” that we’ve just created, if the anchor points don’t show
up, zoom in on the image until you see a blue line around the object, with the pen tool
selected hold “Ctrl” and click on it.
The anchor points will show up and you can make any adjustments that are needed.
When you’re done working with the “Pen Tool”, right-click on the image, and choose
“Make Selection.”
Leave the settings at default and press ok.
This will create a selection area around our object.
Press enter to hide the work path or deselect in the “Paths” panel.
Next, we can remove the background entirely from our original image.
Press “Shift+Ctrl+I”.
This will invert the selection area so that everything apart from your object is selected.
Now press delete.
If you want to keep the original layer as a reference, with your object selected press
“Ctrl+J”.
This will create a copy of your object that will be placed on a new layer with a transparent
background.
We’re almost done.
If the object in your image is well defined and there is no shallow depth of field that
blurs out the edges, go to the “Properties” panel, press “Remove Background,” and
the program will do everything for you.
This will create a mask layer that will hide everything around the selected object
Easy as that.
When working on custom designs, you'll find that you have a lot more creative freedom
when all the elements are separated.
If you feel like the background is necessary for your design, you can always add in it
our Printful Mockup generator.
Gradually we’ll move to more advanced tutorials, but in the meanwhile don’t forget to subscribe
to our channel and tap on the bell icon so that you won’t miss out next episode.
If you have suggestions for other design tutorials drop them down in the comments.