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Hey everybody, welcome into this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, brought to you,
as always, by tutvid.com. We're going to take a look at some of my favorite
tips and tricks for cutting out people. In fact, cutting out any object; making
complex selections, you name it, here in Photoshop with select and mask among
the other selection tools that we have available to us. You're going to love it.
You're going to learn so much. I think you're really going to enjoy it; and if
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that you do, in fact, get the video. So, without further adieu, let's jump
into Photoshop and check this thing out, right now. Okay, here we are
in Photoshop and the goal would be to select one of these women off
of this backdrop. I'm going to take the woman here on the left. What I
would do, is create a basic selection around her. My typical tool of
choice would be the quick selection brush. So, with this I would go in
and quickly paint a selection over her. Add and subtract all of the bits
that I do or don't want, and then we'll move on to the next step. There
we go, just like that. We have this nice selection around her. Well,
it's okay, it's not super duper nice. It's just okay. And at this point, what
I'm looking at is the different types of edges that I have here in the
object I'm cutting out. Down here where I'm looking at her clothing, and
her skin, and her shoes, these are all very straight, somewhat clean,
contrast-y edges. Whereas, up here with her hair, well, that's another
ball of wax, right? That's got the messy, frizzy, frilly edges that are all
over the place. So, we're going to divide up our selection making
process into several passes. And we're going to double pass with
select and mask to get a really great selection. So, I want to focus here
on her head, and the hair, first. So, with this selection I'm going to
go Select>Select and Mask. Now here in select and mask, I'm going
to ignore the body. I don't even care what's going on down there.
This is my focus up here. Now, I'm going to work with the refine edge
brush tool, right here, this guy. And I'm going to make sure the brush
is relatively large. Alright, and you can up and downsize your brush
by using the square bracket keys. I'm going to go with something
that is about right about that big. That feels right for this image. And
once I have that, I'm going to begin painting over her hair, and trying
to knock out as much of the purple-y stuff as possible. There we go.
You can see we've done a lot there. I'll probably make my brush a
little bit smaller here as I come across the very top part of her hair
right up there. Great. Make the brush a little bit larger as I come
around the back side, and tuck in by her neck. There we go. We have
cleaned up and selected the bits of hair that we want. Now, we may
have over-selected a little bit. But I'm not going to be too terribly
concerned with that right now. We're going to come back in in a little
bit and retouch-up the edges. What I want do, and the important thing
here is, that I want to output this to a new layer with layer mask,
from my little output to drop down menu. New layer with layer mask,
and hit OK. And you can see, we have a second layer here. I'm going
to double click on the layer name, and I'm going to name this hair,
just so I know, look, your complex hair selection it's tucked away up
there on that layer. Now, what I want to do, is come back to my other
layer, and let's make this selection for the clothing. You can use the
little re-select option - note the hotkey CMD+SHIFT+D, that would
be CTRL+SHIFT+D on the PC - if you hit that button, it's going to
re-select our selection before we jump into select and mask; and
what this is doing for us, is giving the same exact base starting point
at which we entered select and mask before. But mainly, it's just
saving us the time of all the re-selection. So, with this selection,
once more, we'll go Select>Select and Mask; and note, by the way,
I'm back on the original layer. So, we'll go Select>Select and Mask,
and now here, I'm going to ignore the hair. I don't care about the
hair, we have that selection, right? What I will do, is go around the
edges. You can see, there's a little bit of pink remaining from the
background there. We can get rid of that stuff using the brush tool.
So, you can use the brush tool, and I'm going to set it to minus; and
I'm going to make my brush really, really small, and I'm going to go
in and clear stuff like that out. So, I'm going to move around my image
really quickly and clear some of that junk out, and make sure all the
little, itty bitty areas of my selection are just perfect, just what I want,
before we move onto the next part of this process. And I think that's
looking good. By the way, you can go in and use the quick selection
tool in here. I find the quick selection tool in regular Photoshop,
outside of select and mask, works better than the quick selection
in here. So, that's what I usually roll with. Now, the issue is, any time
you're working with large, straight-edged objects like this, unless
you have a really amazing base selection, which, we have a really
good selection here, so we've got really clean edges - but most of
the time, you're not going to have really clean edges, because
you're going to begin with a relatively rough selection, and for
straight edged objects, select and mask usually does a really bad
job. Well, the way around that is, I like to dump a little bit of
smoothing into it. These are all global refinements. They happen to
every bit of your selection. So, I'll go smooth ten, and then I would
feather the edge quite a bit. You can see, it really looks bad, right?
But then you're going to pump the contrast up, which helps restore
that edge and build out a much more natural looking edge; and
again, this is a technique I use for strong, straight, high contrast
edges. Stuff that is not like hair. You can see what it's doing to the
hair up here. It's still super unnatural looking selection, but I don't
care about that. We have that selection already. What we're doing
is cleaning up all the straight line edges everywhere else here. But
once we have everything laid out as we wish, we would go ahead
and output this, as well, New Layer>Layer Mask and hit OK. And
now, we have our two masks that we've created, on two versions
of this. This one we'll call body. We really call clothing and body,
same difference here. We've got the body selection and the hair
selection. So, with these two layers, what I'll do, is I'm going to
select them both, and I'm going to drag them over to a new image
just so we can see them over a background that's not that original
purple background. This obviously doesn't work because of context
and perspective - and she's floating in midair, for starters. But all
that stuff, none of that matters though. We're just worried about
how does this look over a new background? And we can see, the
clothing looks pretty good. In fact, it would look better if we just
shut the hair off altogether and just had one copy of the image.
But the hair up here is looking really, really bad. But that's fine,
because, of course, this is the mask for the body layer. Let's shut
the body off and look at the hair layer. The hair layer actually looks
pretty good. There's some haloing going on. There's some bits of
her hair that look like they're missing. So, here's what you want to
do for really difficult selections like this. And this, again, is why it's
so valuable to have this up on its own layer. Select the mask for
the hair layer, right? This is great to do once you have your model
or your object in place, because you look at it, you see it in context
with the colors that are behind everything like that. What I want to
do, is I want to grab my brush tool and I'm going to set the brush
tool blend mode to soft light, and I'm going to reduce the opacity
down around 50% or so, and I can paint with either black as my
foreground color, black is going to make some of this fringing go
away a little bit; and using my brush set to soft light does a beautiful
job of preserving all the other details. Or I can paint with white,
which is going to help thicken up some of the hair that's looking a
little thin. But you can see, as I come close to the edges, I bring back
a lot of that white, very light pinkish, purplish background color. So,
maybe I'll go back to black here, and I'll say you know what? I want
to darken and move some of that away. The point is, we want to be
very subtle here with this step, we just want to do very minor clean
up. This still is not the final result. We just want to make it look a
little bit better. We want to make sure we select this mask, and then
we're going to open up the properties panel. By the way, you can
go Window>Properties, and we can hit the select and mask again,
and enter select and mask for this layer mask again. Again, here's
an important tip, I have the other layer shut off. So, we only want
to be working on our hair mask. I'm going to go Select and Mask, and
here in this, I'm not going to mess with anything other than
decontaminate colors. But not only that, I'm going to make sure my
view is set to on layers. On layers is showing me exactly what's
happening with the backdrop not being something like solid black,
or solid white, or the red/ruby overlay - but, instead, just in the
context of the project that we're looking at, on those layers that
are actually there. Let's tick on decontaminate colors, and you can
see, whoa! that did a lot. There's still some flat, weird-looking
stuff. So, let's try toning decontaminate colors back a little bit. Maybe
we'll push it back to 50. Somewhere around there. And keep pushing
it back, until you're just getting rid of that haloing, but not pumping
in all sorts of unnecessary edge, light and color. See, there we're not
quite doing enough to get rid of some of that haloing. So, maybe I'll
push it up around 35-40, and I'm going to output this, again, to a new
layer with layer mask. I'm going to hit OK; and this now, I would call
something like hair decon, or something like that, for decontaminate;
and then we have the hair. And if we zoom out, now you can see all
that weird haloing is gone. The problem is, all of the body selection
is not as good as it should be. So, what we would do, is we would
get rid of all the body stuff. And I'd do this with a simple poly-lasso
tool. So, I'll just make a little lasso cut here across her chest, and
loop down around her entire body. Voila! And select the layer
mask for the hair decontamination layer, and I'm just going to fill
this with black. So, let's go Edit>Fill>Fill With black, and hit OK, and
all of that disappears. Well, that's great. We've got her hair.
Now, we need to turn on the body layer. By the way, we can just
get rid of this other hair mask layer, unless you want to save it.
Nothing wrong with that. And then for the body selection, we
obviously want to save the body selection, but not the hair,
because the hair looks awful. Well, what we do up here, is make
sure we're working on the mask for the body selection and I like
to use the brush tool for this. Let's set the brush tool back to a
normal blend mode. Opacity of 100%. We're painting with black.
And just begin painting away up here around the hair, and because
we're painting with black, if I ALT/OPT click on the mask you can
see, we're just painting away all the area of the mask that's
revealing the bad hair selection up there. ALT/OPT click on the
mask to get back to normal view mode, and you can just come
through here and clear all that junk out and what you're left with
is the perfect body selection on one layer, and the perfect hair
selection on the other. At this point, you really could merge the
two layers. I prefer to stay a little non-destructive and not do that.
Maybe with both layers selected, a little CMD/CTRL+G to group
them up, and we can name this "our model," or something like
that. And there you have it, so the whole key here is being able
to use select and mask in multiple passes to get highly refined
selections for different applications. In the case of her body, lots
of straight, high contrast lines; with the hair, this very frizzy, fringey,
much more complex object that needs to be selected and then we
can meld them both together non-destructively using the wonderful
power of masks right here in Photoshop. And there you have it,
that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the techniques that I love to use.
In fact, it's the primary technique I've found myself using for some of
the more professional work that I've done. For cutting stuff out, doing
the double, or triple, or sometimes quadruple pass with select and
mask, just isolating the type of edge that I'm extracting, and I've been
getting really, really good results with it. This is why I wanted to share
this technique with you. Hopefully it helps you out in terms of making
your own selections and really speeding up your work flow when it
comes to making selections. But not only that, making better selections.
That's what I want. That's what I would love to see. If you enjoyed this
video, make sure you subscribe to this channel. Of course, you can follow
me over on Instagram as well, @tutvid. And yeah, for learning how to
make better selections in Photoshop using select and mask, and the
various tools and techniques available to us through select and mask -
why am I speaking so fast?! Ladies and gentlemen, that's it!
Get it? Got it? Good!
Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one!