All right, so I'm just in the middle of recording a brand new, full length video tutorial to
go on to my website.
Part of that tutorial is where I actually cut out the tree that you can see on screen
now and put it into a new environment.
As it's a really quick way to do it, quick technique, I thought I'd just do that as a
short video for you this week.
How do I go about cutting it out?
Simply, I would use for something like this, the Select and I'd go to Color Range.
The contrast between the actual tree and the sky should make this really really simple.
There's just a couple of extra little things in there that I want to show you.
If you haven't used it before the Color Range basically works by whenever we bring up the
dialogue box we put our cursor into our picture and anywhere that we click the color underneath
it is what we're going to select.
Photoshop will look at the color you click on top of and it will say, "What else in that
picture has a similar color?"
You'll see that show up in the preview, just over here on the right hand side you can see
that some areas are white, some areas are black.
Basically wherever you click down that color and the colors just either side of it are
what's been selected and showing up as white in the preview.
What I want to do is I want to get the tree out of this scene here.
I'm going to click down on some of the leaves and I can also hold down my shift key and
then click and drag across the tree to pick up a few more leaves in there that have got
a slightly different color to them and tint.
I can also use this thing here called the Fuzziness Slider.
I don't know why they called it fuzziness, maybe range would be a better name for it,
but basically what this means is wherever we click down we can then go to the right
hand side to tell Photoshop to choose more colors either side of where we clicked, or
we can take it to the left to say choose less colors than where we actually clicked on top
of.
I'm going to take it a little bit to the right, and you can see that the preview here is getting
more and more white over that tree area.
There's so far when I go with it, if I go too far you can probably see on your screen
how the actual sky area is starting to go a little bit funky.
Let's just bring that back a touch to somewhere like that.
Once you've done that you click 'Okay', Photoshop throws a right hissy fit and you can see all
the marching ants going all over the place.
Now, we only want the tree, I don't want all this bottom bit with all the grass and these
smaller trees here selected.
I'm just going to get my Lasso tool, hold down my Alt key, so that's going to take away
from the selection and I'm just going to drag very very rough outline into the sky, down
around the trunk, and then over to the right hand side, underneath, and all the way back
up.
That now has taken all those other areas that have been selected out, so the only ones really
around the tree.
To cut the tree off the background, now that we've got the marching ants there I'm just
going to click to add a layer mask, and it kind of virtually cuts it out, and you can
see that it's done an okay job, but there are quite a few transparent areas.
In fact, to make that just a little bit easier to see I'm going to put a layer beneath that.
If I hold down my Command or Control key, click on the new layer icon, it'll put a layer
directly below, and I'm going to fill that with white, so we've got Edit, Fill and we'll
just choose white and click 'Okay'.
Now you can kind of see what we're getting here.
There are certain areas in the sky that aren't pure white, and if I just hold down my Option
key or Alt key, click on the layer mask, you can see that we've got quite a bit of grey
coming in there which we don't want.
I need to get rid of that, and a really quick way I can do that is just get a brush, a normal
brush with a black foreground color, and the trick here is that I'm going to use a blend
mode, in the Options at the top I'm going to choose Overlay, this basically means I
can use this brush and it will only effect the grey areas.
You can see as I'm painting around, you can see that the brush is actually going over
parts of the tree but it's not affecting them, it's only affecting the grey areas on what
should be black around the tree.
The great thing with this as well is the tree did have a few bits of transparency, and you
can probably see on your screen how it's not pure white in some areas.
Using that same Overlay Blend mode with a brush, if I now paint with white I can then
paint over the tree and it will actually increase the white over the grey areas within the tree,
but again it's not affecting the opposite color.
You can see as I paint on the trunk the black areas of the image aren't being affected.
This is a really great way of finessing any layers masks or channels that you create.
Let's just go for around about there.
Let's go back to the normal view, hold down the Alt or Option key, click on the layer
mask and we can see there that's done a pretty good job.
If you wanted the tree to have a little bit more density, if it still wasn't looking quite
good, if we just zoom in, just watch the leaves now, if I just duplicate this layer by holding
down my Command or Control key and pressing J, can you see how the leaves and the branches
thickened up a little bit?
You can press it again and again until you get a really dense tree there.
The top layer is selected, I'm going to hold down my Shift key, click on the bottom layer,
so now all four of those layers are selected, go to the flyout menu at the top right hand
corner of the layers panel and I'm just going to go Merge Layers, and then I've got my tree
cut out.
Now if I get my Move tool, I can then click, move the tree around, and I can drag it off,
put it into a new scene and composite it in.
It's just a really quick way that you could actually cut out something that ordinarily
you would think would be quite tricky, but just a really simple use of the Color Range
and then using that Overlay Blend mode with a brush when you're painting in black or white
makes it so much easier.
Right, that's all I've got for you.
I'll see you next week.