Do you want to make better cut-outs for your composites in Photoshop?
If so, then, check out these three amazing masking tips and tricks,
which includes one that shows you how to deal with hair and busy backgrounds.
Why don't we jump right into the tutorial?
In this tip, I'm going to show you why using
Blending Modes is not always the best solution for images like this.
Let me show you what I mean by that.
If you have a layer where you have a black background in a white foreground
and you want to keep the white areas,
a lot of times the easiest thing to do is select the Screen Blending Mode
and that removes the black and keeps the white.
But this is not always the best solution because sometimes you may want to apply
a Layer Style or certain effects to the actual objects in the scene.
And if you were to do it with the Blending Mode, it wouldn't work.
As you can see here,
if I apply a Bevel and Emboss, it wouldn't apply it to the actual white pixels
instad, it will apply it to the edge of the canvas
And that's not what we want.
So let me show you how to get actual transparency from something like this
I'll change the Blending Mode back to Normal,
And from the Channels Panel, you can see all the channels that make up this image.
In an image like this, all the channels will be exactly the same.
And all you need to do is hold Ctrl on Windows or Command on the Mac
and click on any one of these channels so that you can load the bright pixels as a selection
I'll click on RGB, go back into the Layers Panel
and create a new Solid Color fill layer, set it to white, and press OK.
And that'll give me basically the same result.
And I have actual transparency.
So when I double-click to the side of the layer, I can apply a Bevel and Emboss
and I can adjust it accordingly and make it seem like this is actual snow on that background,
I can also add a Drop-Shadow and adjust the different settings
to get a more realistic result.
I'll press OK.
And if I click on the Effects eye icon, you can see that before and the after.
So remember, if you're using Blending Mode to mask out your background,
you might want to consider converting that into an actual layer
with transparency so that you have more options in your composites.
And before we continue, I would like to mention that I have
a brand new show on Adobe Live with Kladi from Printmysoul.
This show is called RE-WORK IT,
and we're going to take your files, your Photoshop files,
illustrator files and InDesign files, and we're going to rework them.
We're going to give you our thoughts
and opinions on how you can improve your work.
The first show is actually today.
It's premiering about an hour after I release this video.
So if you're watching this video on the day that is released—October 7th,
then, make sure that you look at the link
in the description and you click over to check out the show live.
And if you're watching this later on, then no worries, the show will be recorded
so you can still click on the same link down below and watch the recording.
But the show will be live on October 7 at 3:00 PST.
So make sure that you come out and support us.
Thank you so much, and back to the tutorial!
I'm going to show you now what to do when
you get fringing—those white outlines around the edges of your mask.
So, one of the easiest ways to cut out
a person from my background is to use a Remove Background feature in Photoshop.
You can click on the Lock icon to unlock the layer.
Then, from the Properties panel, under Quick Actions,
you'll see the Removed Background button.
When you click on it,
Photoshop will use Artificial Intelligence known as Adobe Sensei
to remove the background from the photo.
In most cases, it does a really good job,
but we do have a problem and so that you can better see the problem.
I'm going to create a Solid Color fill layer,
make it dark gray and place it below the layer.
One way of moving layers is by using a keyboard shortcut.
If you press Ctrl on Windows or Command on the Mac
and tap on the left bracket key, it will move a layer down.
And if you hold Ctrl on Windows or Command on the Mac
and tap on the right bracket key, it will move a layer up
so you can use those keyboard shortcuts to easily move layers up and down.
But you'll see a few issues.
First, the Artificial Intelligence missed this area here, so you can simply paint
with black on these pixels on the Layer Mask to hide that effect.
And I'll select a round brush and I can make the brush smaller
by tapping on the left bracket key on the keyboard.
Then, I'll quickly remove some of these imperfections.
I don't have to be very precise.
That's not the point of this tutorial,
but I do want it to look a little nicer and not have these large white areas.
And I'll also remove the white areas in between her fingers.
Again, I'm not being very precise,
but in your projects, do take the time to fine-tune these smaller details.
We'll call this good for now.
But what I want you to focus on is these white edges.
And one of the easiest ways to remove them
is by using the Minimum filter in Photoshop.
If you go into Filter > Other,
you can select Minimum, make sure that the Layer Mask is selected,
that the focus, the white outline is on the Layer Mask
and then you can contract the mask by a number of Pixels.
In this case, you probably don't need to go so far
so I'll just adjust that accordingly until the edge halos are gone.
I think 1.6 Pixels is good in this case
This is before and after.
You can also select an Algorithm that will
preserve either square or round edges.
In this case, Roundness will give me a better result.
So I'll press OK
so all the edge halos are now gone from my image.
What I can do now is select the Layer Mask
and click on Select and Mask and I can simply smooth out those edges
and apply a little bit of contrast to make those edges sharper.
And I can press OK.
And this is an extra tip:
What I can do now is work on the hair.
So I always like to make all my edge
adjustments first and leave the hair to the very end.
So I'll go back into the Select and Mask workspace,
select the Refine Edge tool
and paint on the edges around her hair to reveal those hair strands
when you're done just press OK and that will look much, much better.
You can always go back if you missed an area.
Looks like I missed an area right here.
You can go back into the Select and Mask workspace by double-clicking on the Mask
and I'll change the View so that we can see the Onion Skin mode.
And I'll just paint over these edges here
just to get a better result like so
and I'll press OK.
and that looks much better.
The mask is not perfect, but that's OK.
I can always paint with black to hide or white to reveal.
So I'm going to reveal this part of her shirt and that looks much, much better.
The next bonus tip for this section that I
will show you is what you do with these flyaway hairs.
And what you can do is create a New Layer and clip it to the layer below
Ctrl Alt G on Windows or Command Option G on the Mac
to make a Clipping Mask.
Now, everything on this layer will only affect the layer below
and I can select the Brush Tool and I can make a larger brush by tapping
in the right bracket key on the keyboard
and then holding Alt on Windows or Option on the Mac
to temporarily activate the Eyedropper tool.
Just select the hair color that is right next to the edge there and paint.
I can just keep painting on those edges
for these areas, we're going to have to use a different layer.
Create a New Layer
Ctrl Alt G on Windows or Command Option G on the Mac
and find a light color like this color here and paint over those edges.
The trick will be to use a Blending Mode to get better results
With this layer selected,
I can change the Blending Mode to Darken
so that that effect is only applied on the brightest pixels.
If it's too strong, I can always bring down the Opacity.
The point is, is that I don't want any white hair strands.
Of course, the more time that you spend
fine-tuning these areas, the better results you'll get.
The next step would be to do exactly the same thing on the other side.
In this next tip, I'm going to show you what to do when you have hair that is very
difficult to select, like in this case here,
where the background is very busy and her hair is very fine and very bright.
And there's definitely no contrast between the foreground and background.
So we'll start with what we did earlier.
I'll select this Layer and then click
on Remove Background just to see what the artificial intelligence does
it does a fairly good job, it's not that bad
considering how busy the background is and how fine and bright her hair is,
and to better see her hair up against the background,
what I'll do is create a new Solid Color fill layer and I'll make it a dark gray.
And there are several things you can do:
I'm going to press Ctrl J on Windows or Command J on the Mac
on this layer to duplicate it and I'll work on the layer on top.
The first thing that I would recommend that you do
is see if you can improve this Layer Mask.
So with the Mask selected that you can go on Select and Mask
and then switch over into the Black and White View
and with the Refine Edge Tool, just click-and-drag over the edge and see if
you can get an improvement on that selection.
Basically, what you're trying to do is
avoid these blurry areas like I have down here.
It may be difficult to do in this case,
but I'm still going to try and see what the result is.
But as you can see, I still get a lot of blurry areas,
so it probably won't be that great of a selection.
Again, it's not terrible considering how difficult it was to select,
but definitely not ideal.
So what I'll do is I'll just delete this
Layer and duplicate this Layer
one more time: Ctrl J on Windows or Command J on the Mac
And I'm going to show you something else that you can do.
I'll select the Lasso tool and I'm just going to make a selection around the hair
that is out here on the edges that is just way too difficult to select.
Like so, then I'll fill with black on the Layer Mask
so that I can hide those pixels, black is currently my background color
I'll press Ctrl Backspace to fill with black so that now I just have
this straight edge, which obviously doesn't look very good.
But what I can do now is find an image that does have easy-to-select hair
and create a brush out of it so that we can use it on this photo.
Let me show you what I mean.
I have this second image here, and in this case, her hair is fantastic.
We can definitely see the separation between her hair in the background.
So I'll create a brush out of her hair
so that I can use it on the other image.
First, I'll select the Crop tool and I'll crop the areas that I don't need
Basically, up to this area here is good.
I'll click on the checkmark to commit the changes,
Then, I'll go into the Channels Panel and I'll look for the channel that has
more contrast between her hair in the background.
And it looks like the Blue Channel does have more contrast.
So I'll duplicate this channel
by clicking-and-dragging it into the New Channel icon.
And what I'm going to do is press Ctrl I on Windows
Command I on the Mac to invert
I want to make the things that I want to keep white and everything else black.
What I can do now is go into Image > Adjustments > Levels
Make the background as black as possible.
It's already black so I don't have to do too much work and then everything else
as bright as possible and you can adjust accordingly
until you get the results that you want.
In this case, something like this will work.
I'll press OK
I'll select the Lasso tool one more time
and I'll just make a really quick selection over these areas that didn't get converted into white
that should be completely white.
And I'll add this area here as well
by holding Shift and clicking-and-dragging
Then, to fill with white,
which is the Foreground Color press Alt and Backspace.
that's Option Delete on the Mac
Now, I can load the bright pixels as
a selection, so I'll hold Ctrl on Windows or Command on the Mac
and click on the Blue Copy thumbnail to load the bright pixels as a selection
Then I'll click on RGB,
go back into the Layers Panel and hide this layer.
Then, I'll create a New Layer and fill that layer with black.
So make sure that your Foreground Color is black.
So click on this icon to make the Foreground Color black
and then press Alt Backspace or Option Delete on the Mac
to fill with the Foreground Color which is black in this case.
Then, I'll press Ctrl D or Command D on the Mac to deselect.
What I'll do now is create one more Layer and fill that Layer with white.
White is my Foreground Color
so Ctrl Backspace on Windows or Command Delete on the Mac
We can turn this into a brush.
Go into Edit > Define Brush Preset
I can call this curly hair
and press OK
Photoshop will automatically activate the brush that you just created and you can paint with it.
When I go back into my working document,
you'll notice that the brush is so much bigger than the image I was working with
and that's great.
You can tap on the left bracket key on the keyboard to reduce the brush size.
Then, you can do one of two things:
First, you can try painting with white on the Layer Mask
to reveal the edges and see if that looks realistic.
and in this case, I think that it's working fairly good.
Remember that in Photoshop 2020,
we got the ability to rotate the brush with a keyboard shortcut.
So if I tap on the right arrow key on the keyboard,
the brush rotates and I can continue painting on edges like so
Or you can use the Angle Control in the Options bar. Totally up to you.
But the point is,
is that you can now simply start rotating your brush accordingly and painting
on the edges so that you get the result that you want.
And obviously you can resize your brush and paint on the edges like so
Also, you can create a Layer underneath everything else,
make the brush a little bit bigger
and then hold Alt on Windows or Option on the Mac and click to select
the color and paint with that color as well to get better results.
I can just keep doing that over
and over again on different areas until I get a much nicer edge.
So this is way more realistic than what I had before, which was this here.
As you can see, the edges don't look as good.
So now when I bring in the background that I'm going to use for my composite,
I can start making decisions on what shade the hair will be.
In this case, what I probably would do is just select the brightest pixel here
of her hair and then just use that to match the lighting in the scene like so
just keep selecting different hair colors to make it more realistic.
When I zoom in, you'll see that the edges are looking pretty good.
However, you do need to watch out for these areas that have straight edges.
So you definitely will need to select
the mask, select that same brush and paint with white with a small brush in those
areas just to make sure that the edges are not straight.
So you can keep panning around the image by holding the spacebar and make sure
that there are no straight edges on the mask.
And I think this looks pretty good.
Double-click on the Hand tool and enable this layer.
And obviously, the more time that you
spend fine-tuning, the smaller details, the better your results will be.
So that is the secret that a lot of professionals use.
We paint the hair back in instead of masking it.
It's a lot easier to do and it looks much better.
I hope that you enjoy these three tips
and tricks for better cutouts for composites in Photoshop.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments down below.
And also, don't forget to check out RE-WORK IT with Kladi from Printmysoul and myself
The first show is starting today, October 7th at 3:00 PM PST
So if you're watching this video on the day that I release it,
click on the link below so that you can watch Live on RE-WORK IT.
Kladi and I will work on Photoshop files, Illustrator files, and InDesign files
submitted by you, our viewers, and we'll work on them live and give you
our thoughts and opinions on how to improve them.
The first show is today
Check out the link in the description.
And if you're watching this video after it's released, then no worries.
You can watch that recording again.
The link is below the description. Thank you so much.
And I look forward to seeing you again in the next Photoshop tutorial.