Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show
you how to remove the background from a photo using Pixelmator Pro on your Mac.
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So a common thing you may want to do with a photo is remove the background from it.
Maybe you just want to take the background away completely. Maybe you want to put the
subject on a different background or maybe you want to take the background
and blur it a little but not blur the subject. So let's start off here with a really simple
example. Here we have a perfect situation. It's a very neutral solid color behind a subject. Now
Pixelmator has a ton of different tools that will allow you to select either just the background
or just the subject. Here you've got the General Selection Tool and this will allow you to select
rectangles and circles. Not ideal for this. Then you've got this tool here which will allow
you to do a Free Selection so you can carefully draw the outline
between the background and the subject. That takes a long time. Instead you may want to go
and use the Magnetic Selection Tool which will try to find the edge and kind of cling to it.
It's really neat and it could be used for this. But there are better tools for doing this.
If you go here you'll see Quick Selection. This will allow you to fairly quickly select
the subject or the background. Now while this is a great tool for the job it's not the best
one. But I'm going to show you how to use it anyway and you'll find out why later. So
you could see the yellow area here. It is the Selection. But if I click it and drag
it will continue to add to the selection. So I can drag throughout the background.
and continue to add parts until I have the entire background. Then I release the trackpad or mouse
and you could see it's got my selection here. Now I can refine. The best way to refine is to
zoom in, you could use this or on the trackpad you could just use two fingers, and you get a closer
look and see how well it did. Now if I wanted to include more things in the background all I need
to do is hold the Shift key down and you could see I get that circle and a plus in the middle
of it. I can add more to it. So I click here and you could see it adds that section. Now the circle
is fairly big so let's decrease the brush size to something much smaller, like 20%. Now I could add
more refined little areas there. You could always Undo if you grabbed a little bit too much. So
let's look right here. Here's an area that I want to remove from the selection. I'm going
to use the Option key and get the minus in there. You could see I could select and drag to select
a little bit more of that area. So I can use Shift to add to the selection and Option
to remove from the selection if I want. I can continue to refine to get it as close to the
edge of the subject as I want. Now I want to go through the entire outline of the subject to see
if there are any other places where I can make the selection a bit better. Now with the background
selected I can simply use the Delete key to remove it. Now I just have the subject remaining.
Now I mentioned that there is an even better way to do this because Pixelmator
Pro has two tools that are basically the opposites of the same thing. You can go to
Edit, Remove Background or Shift Delete or Control S for Select Subject. There's also a button here
for Remove Background as well. So let's try Shift Delete and you could see it's going to analyze
the image and it's going to remove the background. Now while this is the quickest way to do it, no
doubt, but it's not the best. Notice, for instance it didn't quite do a great job here at the top.
It probably could have taken a little bit more of that off. We can select that separately and
then create a more refined result. Or I'm going to Undo here and instead use that Select Subject
option. So this is going to do the opposite in two different ways. One,
it is going to select the subject not the background. So the opposite selection. The
other thing is it's not going to delete anything. It just creates a selection. Now we can actually
delete the background if we wanted to by going to Edit and then Invert Selection, Shift Command i,
and now we have the background selected. Now I could hit Delete if I wanted to.
Or, I could now refine using that same Quick Selection as before.
So I could use those same tools. I'm going to add to the selection here and remove from the
selection in other places to get more of what I want. So I could better refine it
before I do the delete.
This, I think, is the best way to do it. Use Select Subject and then use Quick Selection
to refine things to get it as good as you possibly can. Then I could just press the
Delete key and it removes the background. So let's try this with another example here.
I'm going to use Control S to select this subject. Then I'm going to select the Quick Selection Tool
and I'm going to go in and better refine things. So you can see it really didn't do a very good
job on a lot of things. I'm going to Add a lot here to get the subject completely selected.
You have to zoom in a great deal here to actually work around the hair. Some bright spots here that
didn't quite get selected correctly. Then when I've got everything like I want I can use Shift
Command i to invert the selection to select the background instead of the subject. Then I could
delete the background. Here's another example. Let's use Control S to select the subject. It does
a pretty good job. You can see some of the mistakes that it made here around this strap.
Let's zoom into this area. I have the Quick Selection Tool added. So I could easily add
these parts to the selection. Get it just right. I can check the rest of everything else.
Now if I wanted to I could Delete the background. I'll just do Shift Command i to invert the
selection and then Delete or let's Undo all the way back to when I just have the Subject selected.
Let's say my goal is to blur or change the exposure of just the background and not the
foreground. A mistake people make is using Command X to cut and then Command V to paste.
Now you have one layer that has just the subject and the other layer that has just the background.
You don't really want to do that. What you want to do instead for better results
is to Copy and Paste. So you have one layer here that is just the Subject
and the other layer is everything. So now when I select that background layer
and I've got both on top I can adjust the background layer. Let's go to Effects here
and Add An Effect. Add a Blur and I can make the background blurrier like that.
Now another thing you may want to do is to put a different background behind
the subject. So in this case I want to Copy again and Paste. Then I'm going to drag and drop
another image here between these two layers. Command D to deselect but I can click here
and move the subject around. Place them somewhere else. Even scale them a bit like that
to have them somewhere else. Now notice that there is a little bit of a glow here around the subject.
So what helps in these situations if I Undo all the way back here to where I've got the subject
selected I can go to any of these selection tools here and I could click Select and Mask.
That gives me the ability to refine the selection. So if I Expand the selection you could see I get
more selected. I want less selected. I want to go down ever so slightly. Like maybe 2%.
Negative 2% to select less of the subject. So now if I click Apply or hit Return, I do Copy
and Paste, and now when I Drag and Drop the new background here I get a little bit less of a
glow around the edges. So the subject blends in a little bit better with the background.
That's how you cutout a background or cutout a subject
in a photo using Pixelmator Pro. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.