Hi. Welcome back to The PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com. I'm Jesus Ramirez.
In this video, I'm going to show you how to cut out a person from their background, even
when you're working with a photo whose background you want to keep.
Separating your main subject from the photo gives you a lot of flexibility when editing
your photos. You've seen me use this technique before in my Blurring Backgrounds tutorial.
But in this video, we will focus on the advantages of cutting out a person from their background
when applying distortions like the liquefy filter, or the puppet warp tool, and when
repositioning a person within your photo. Okay, let's get started. The first step is
to make a selection around the main subject of your image.
In this case, is this runner here. You can do that in several different ways, one of
the easiest ways is to use the quick selection tool.
In older versions of Photoshop, you will have to click and drag around the person to make
a selection, in the newer version of Photoshop, you can simply press the select subject button.
In Adobe's Artificial Intelligence, Adobe Sensei will make a selection out of the main
subject of the image. Make sure that everything is selected. Adobe
Sensei missed part of his shoe, so I'll click and drag to add that in. I'll also make sure
that the other shoe is selected and I'll include the shoelace. Then I'm going to tap the Z
key on the keyboard to enable the zoom tool, and I'm going to zoom in to this area.
What you want to do now is, deselect the space in between his arm and body so that if we
move the runner into another area, the background will match.
To do so, select the quick selection tool, hold Alt on Windows, Option on the MAC, and
click and drag to deselect. You can use the left and right bracket keys on the keyboard
to adjust the size of your brush if you need to.
And you can hold the space bar and click and drag, and just pan through the entire image
and make sure that you have a good selection throughout. It looks like I missed the part
here, I'll click and drag to add, and I'll hold Alt, Option on the MAC, and click and
drag to deselect from that area. The selection doesn't need to be perfect,
but make sure that you select all the major errors of your subject. And it looks like
the selection is now pretty good, so I'll double click on the hand tool to fit the image
to screen, and what I'll do is I'll duplicate the background two times.
So I'll click and drag into a new layer icon twice, and I'll name the top layer, Runner,
and back and copy for the second layer is fine, and with the Runner layer selected,
I'm going to click on the new Layer Mask icon to make a Layer Mask out of the selection.
What I did there is remove the background from the image, and what I'm going to do now
with this layer is remove the runner from that background layer. So with that background
layer selected, I'm going to hold Shift, click on the top layer, and then press Ctrl G, Command G
on the MAC, to put that into a group. And I can just call this group, Edit.
Then I'm going to expand the group, and I'm going to make a selection out of the Layer
Mask. So if you hold Ctrl and Windows, Command on the MAC, and click on that layer thumbnail,
you would load the Layer Mask as a selection, and I can now come into my background copy
and disable this layer so that we can actually see the adjustments that we make. What I'm
going to do now is expand the selection so that it's a little larger than what it currently
is. You can go into select, modify, expand for that. And we can expand the selection
three pixels and notice now that we have some space in between the runner and the selection,
and that's what we want. I'll double click on the hand tool to fit
the image to screen, then you can hold Shift and Backspace or go into edit and fill, to
bring up the fill window. And just make sure that under contents, you have content aware,
and press OK. Photoshop will then fill with content, and
it will remove the runner. In this case the content aware does a fairly good job. I'm
going to press Ctrl D, Command D on the MAC, to deselect, and there's only one thing that
we need to worry about. If I press the Z key on the keyboard, click
to zoom in, you'll see that this area where his foot was, is a little blurry.
So I'll work on that, and I'll use the clone stamp tool to fix it. Hold Alt, Option on
the MAC, and click to set a sample source, then you can start painting in those pixels
in a different area and hide the blurry pixels. I'll pan over and work on this area since
it's a little blurry as well. And it looks like I need to fix an issue that we have here.
I'll double click on the hand tool to fit the image to screen, and that's pretty much
it. I've removed the runner form the background, and now I can work with him independently
from the background. The next step is to select the runner, right
click, and convert him into a smart object so that I can apply adjustments, distortions,
and filters nondestructively. One of the adjustments that you may want to apply is a liquefy adjustment.
So if you go into filter, liquefy, the liquefy window comes up and you can zoom in by holding
Alt on Windows, Option on the MAC, and scrolling up on the mouse wheel.
Make sure that under view options, you have show backdrop, and that you select the background
copy. That way when you make an adjustment, you can see the background that you edited.
And now you can start adjusting your image. One of the things that you can do is make
him more athletic, you can use the four work tool for that, it allows you to push pixels.
In this case, maybe I just wanna push in his sweater just a little bit just to keep him
looking more athletic. And I can maybe shape the hoodie a bit.
Obviously all the adjustments that you make are subjective, do whatever adjustments you
feel add to your image. But the point is, is that notice how I'm just
making all these adjustments, and if I were to push in really deep, I can still see the
background. So that's the reason why we're separating the foreground element from the
background so we can make these adjustments and not worry about distorting the background
at all. So again, in something like this, you might
just wanna shape his body, just to make him a little more athletic, maybe reduce some
of the wrinkles out of his pants. If this were a high-end athletic advertisement, you
would wanna make the athletic wear as perfect as possible. And this would be a technique
that you would use for that. Notice that as I'm pushing pixels I'm increasing and decreasing
the size of the brush, you can use the left and right bracket keys on the keyboard for
that. When you're done, you can just press OK, and I can click on this eye icon so you
can see the before and the after. Another thing that you can do is apply a puppet
warp adjustment. If you go into edit, puppet warp, you should see a mesh, my mesh is disabled.
This is probably what you're looking at. In the options bar, I like to disable the mesh,
just because I really don't need it. And what you can do is create points, so I'll create
a point on his neck, one on his hip, and on his knees, and that will allow me to distort
the image by clicking and dragging on these points.
For example, if you notice, he's sort of leaning forward, maybe he's been running for a while,
he looks a little tired. So maybe I can just click on this point, drag it back just a bit
just to give him just a little bit better posture.
Again these are all subjective adjustments. The point is, is that I'm making all these
adjustments and I don't have to worry about distorting the background. It'll be more noticeable
here if I create a point on his shoe and click and drag back.
Notice how the area behind the shoe is revealed and there's no issues. I'll now click on his
other shoe to create a point, and I can click and drag on that point to reposition his foot.
One trick when using the puppet warp tool is if you hold Alt, Option on the MAC when
a point is selected, you get this little circle and you can click and drag to rotate it.
So if something is not looking right, you can rotate the circle and hopefully it fixes
any distortion issues that you may have. In this case I'm not gonna make anymore adjustments.
I'm just going to click in the check mark to commit the changes. I can click on the
eye icon in the smart label in the layer, and you can see the before and the after.
And by the way, if you wanna learn more about this tool, the puppet warp tool, I have a
tutorial that covers everything you wanna know about this tool. I'll place a link to
that video right below in the description, don't forget to watch it right after this
tutorial. But anyway, another thing that you can do
is with the move tool, just click on the runner layer, and maybe you can place him in a different
part of the image. So maybe you can place him here, because you
want room on the left side for advertisement copy or something like that. So by separating
the background from the foreground, you can make really big changes to your image even
though this is not really a composite, it's just the photo.
I probably push these adjustments just a bit too far, but I do think that they help illustrate
the power of this technique. If you haven't watched my tutorial on blurring backgrounds,
then I highly recommend watching it. I use exactly the same technique to get a
much better and realistic blur. The link for this video is right below in the description.
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