Hi folks.
Glyn here, back with another video for you.
This is episode 93, and this time I want to go through something that's going to be new
to some of you, but a bit of a reminder for those of you who've been subscribed to this
channel for a while.
It's a workflow that I have for getting the very best results when using the quick selection
tool for making selections and cut outs.
All right, so I'll try and keep this nice and brief, we'll take it through in logical
steps.
Before we start, just so that you know, this actually a picture here of my buddy Dave Clayton,
from the Movie "Up" inspired photo shoot that we had just a few short weeks ago.
To give you an idea of the out of camera shot, there's Dave playing the part of Carl from
the movie.
After I reckon about an hour or so, is worth of retouching Photoshop, I managed to get
into this point here.
Now what we need to do is cut him out of the original background, and we'll actually go
through the process to drop him into the background that you can see here.
We'll take it nice and steady.
I'll try and explain things as we go through, why I do that particular way.
We're going to use the quick selection tool, should have no problems doing this whatsoever,
but we're actually going to do it to make 2 selections, rather than just doing this
whole cut out here as one.
I'll explain why that is as we go through it.
Let's just get the quick selection tool then press W on the keyboard.
Very easily here we can just click and drag over the body of Dave, and we can see that
the marching ants there, very easily picking up where Dave's outline is.
We're getting a really simple selection there.
Let's just click and drag it down his walking stick, so it includes that as well.
You can see Photoshop has no problem.
There's a few areas that we need to just tidy up.
This area here is the background we can see between the gap, between his arm and his body.
Let's just take that off.
Reduce the size of the cursor there, the marker, hold down the Alt or Option key, it's got
a minus, click into that area, and then that will help us to remove that from the selection.
We don't want to have that bit there, like so.
When I've got a marching ant selection going around, what actually, just look at the head.
What I'm not going to do, is include the head.
Let's just go straight across there.
We're going to do the head as a separate selection, so just go across it, something like that
is fine.
When I've got the marching ants, what I now do, is just press Q on the keyboard to go
into quick mask mode.
This is a very visual way of me seeing how good my selection is.
Anywhere that's now covered with this red overlay, is what I've actually selected.
I'll now zoom in, and I'll hold down the space bar, click and drag around the outline to
see if there's anything that I haven't included, or maybe that I do need to include.
Straight away, I can see here on the walking stick, got a little bit too far over, got
a bit of the background.
All I need to do now is just get a simple round brush, and I'm going to paint with a
white foreground color.
What I'm going to do is just paint and you'll notice, I can actually remove that away from
there, so that's no longer a part of the selection.
Hold down the space bar, click and drag around, that looks fine, that looks good there.
There's a bit on the shoes we''ve actually missed it, so it's a portion of the shoe, and the
actual shoe lace.
Now, again, with this brush, I'm going to paint with a black color, and what I'm going
to do, is just paint over the areas that I've missed.
You can see now that has been covered with that red over lay, which means it's going
to be included in our selection.
Let's just get that just there, we've got all the lace in, now it's looking good.
Zoom out just a touch, come round here and there's a little bit of the background we've
got just showing through between the hand and the actual body.
Again, I'll just get this brush, I'll paint in white, to remove it, so I'll just come
into there like so, and then paint in black just to bring back the areas that we want,
like that.
That's one there, and we've got this little bit here, paint in white to remove it.
We'll just paint over just to include that just there.
All right, so that's looking pretty good.
That's a nice good selection there of the body, so press Q to come out of the quick
mask mode.
We've got our selection marching ants going around his body, that's taken a bit of work,
so now let's make our selection nice and safe, by going to the select menu at the top
of the screen, coming down to "Save" selection.
We'll just call it something simple like body, and then click "Okay".
Now that's nice and saved, and safe there.
We can go select and deselect.
The next thing we're going to do, is actually make a selection of the head, and the hair.
All right, we are going to continue using the quick selection tool to do that.
Let's just zoom in a little bit now, we're using the quick selection tool.
Let's just click and drag around the head.
Go right to the edges, so it get the ears, the top of the hair like so.
There's one little thing to make a note of here.
This will really help with me making these selections using the quick selection tool,
is that you'll notice that when you're selecting hair, you'll probably find these bits of gaps
in between the hair where you can see the background coming through.
As you come over this kind of area here, you can probably just about see it, where you
see where they got the gaps in the hair?
That's where you can see the background.
You don't want to include that in your initial selection so, just hold down your Alt or Options,
get the minus, and just drag the selection back away from those parts, because we can
use something else, very soon to pick those up, and make it look a bit more realistic.
That's looking good, check around the rest of the head.
Make sure there is nothing else we don't want to include, that's fine.
When we've got our selection like that, click on the "Refine edge" button in the top of
the options there to bring us into this part.
This is where you can first of all choose how you want to view your image, as you're
working on the selection.
I think for this one at the moment I'll stick with "On white", and then once we've got that
we can click on "Smart radius".
We can bring up the radius slider, just a little bit at a time.
This is the thing about when we using this area here, as like most things in Photoshop.
Just do a little bit test and assess it, see how it goes, move it a little bit more, see
how that goes.
Rather than putting those settings up too high, straight away, and it looking really
bad.
Just bring it up nice and steady.
Let Photoshop do it's processing and see how that's looking so far.
Just zoom this a little bit more, maybe I can bring this radius slider just
a touch.
If I go too far with it, lets just drag it all the way up here you'll start to notice
the picture starts to go real a little bit funky.
We can see all this weird stuff starting to come in here, that's a bit too far, so let's
just bring it back somewhere around about there, maybe back just a touch more, something
like that.
Oops, that will do.
Now that we've got that, we can then use this refine radius tool, which is actually on
by default, so, when you bring your cursor over into your image area, you'll notice you'll
get this little circle here with a plus symbol inside of it.
You can use your left and right bracket keys to make it bigger or smaller, but now what
you want to do is just drag this around the outside top parts of the hair here to see
if Photoshop can actually pick up any of those fine hairs that we didn't get in the initial
selection, like so.
Drag around like that, and then let go and let's just see how that goes.
Now, it's difficult to see it, with the grey hair on the white background.
Now we can actually dive in and look in it, on these other different views.
Let's just go to the black and white view, and you can see that's not doing a bad job,
because all these little fine hairs going around the top part specially, it's doing
a great job of picking it up.
There is this like a little grey area here that's going to affect this selection and
how it looks in the final result here.
What we can do now is maybe adjust the contrast slider, let's just bring that up just a touch,
so we can actually get rid of that there.
You'll notice if you bring that up too far, you'll start to get rid of some of the very,
very fine hairs, but just by bringing up that contrast slider over to a right a touch, you
will reduce any kind of grey smudgy kind of areas that you're making with your selection,
something like that, it's looking good.
Sometimes I do add just a tiny amount of feather just to soften the selection of, say maybe
.5, something like that will be fine.
Let's go back to the view on white.
That's looking good, pretty much finished in there now.
At very bottom of this dialogue box, it says, "Output to".
This is how you can choose how you want to send this now, back into the main Photoshop
work area.
I'm going to actually leave it set to selection.
I'll click "okay", it jumps back into the main image and we can see the marching ants
is going around the head.
Again, because we've been doing quite a bit of work there, let's make sure we keep it
nice and safe.
We go to "Select", "Save selection", and this one we'll call "Head" and then click "Okay".
Let's just double click on the hand tool in the toolbar here to bring our image to full
view like so.
Select and deselect or just command or control D to get rid of those marching ants.
The hard work has pretty much been done there, all we need to do is combine the "Body" selection
we made and the "Head" selection to make one complete selection that we can then cut out
Dave from the background and throw him over into that new scene.
Those areas that we selected and saved, if you go to the channel's tab over the right
hand side, you'll see them underneath the regular channels that you'd expect to see.
You've got your RGB, which is what you're seeing on screen now.
It's a combination of the red, green and blue channels.
All that information to give us the final image, and as you can see, as you click on
those, this is what the red, green and blue channels give us.
At the very bottom are those 2 that we saved.
First of all, the one that we called "Body", the areas are white, is what we selected.
Then if we click on the other one, we can see the head.
What we would actually want to do now, is combine these 2 to give us one complete selection,
but to make sure that we don't make any errors and ruin all that hard work that we've done,
I'm just going to click on the "Body" one you can see at the moment.
Click on the "Thumbnail" and drag it to the very, very bottom and put it over the new
channel icon and then let go.
You'll see that it'll create a copy of it.
If I double click on the name there, we'll just call that "Cut out".
We know we still got, just in case anything goes wrong, we've got the body, we've got
the head.
Now we've got one here that's going to be a combination of the 2.
Now the moment that cut out only contains the body.
If you want to actually add the head to it, all I'm going to do is hold down my command
or control key and then just click once on the "Thumbnail" of the head channel.
If I just hold on the command or control key, click, you'll notice now it loads the selection.
You can see it in the main work area here.
We've got the marching ants going around in the shape of the head.
All I need to do now is fill that area with white.
We go to "Edit", "Fill" and from the drop down menu here, where it says, "Contents",
we can choose white, then click "Okay" and there we have a complete selection.
We got a combination of both the head and the body to make one complete cut out.
Let's just go, select and deselect.
There is the combined cut out.
What we'll do now is click on the RGB thumbnail at the top to go back to our full color view.
We'll go back to the layers, and now we can actually use that to cut Dave off this background
and put him into that great background that's been drawn by Aaron.
Now this bit's really simple, all we need to do is go to the select menu at the top
of the screen.
Choose "Load selection" and the dialogue box, it appears here, we've got a channel drop
down menu.
If we just click on that to open it up, we'll see here at the 3 channels that we actually
created.
The body one, the head, and the combined one that we called "Cut out".
Let's just click on the one called "Cut out", then click "Okay" and you'll notice you get
the marching ants selection around the entire body and head of Dave.
We then just need to click on the layer mask icon at the bottom of the layer's panel.
Now that we have that marching ants, click on that and you'll see we kind of virtually
cut him off the back ground.
We've actually just used the layer mask here.
We've got the white areas which is showing Dave, the black areas here of the layer's
mask are hiding the background.
We've actually cut him out non-destructively, which is definitely the way that you want
to try and do this just in case you need to go in and make any corrections at some point.
Now that we've cut him out, we get the move tool, click on Dave within the work area,
drag him up and onto the tab that contains the background you want to drop him into.
Keep it held down, drag your cursor into the actual picture here, the background and then
let go and you'll see that he drops nicely into that scene.
All we need to do now, is re-position him and there's maybe one extra little thing I
can show you which will then really make the selections and cut outs absolutely perfect.
All right, so I've jumped forward just a few seconds to re-position Dave, and now I want
to show you that one extra little thing.
If I zoom in, just here, can you see how there's a little bit of a halo going around the walking
stick, and also around the bottom of his trousers and on to his shoes down here.
You can see on this area here.
Now, that is actually part of the original background when we did the cut out.
Now, what you could possibly do here, and this is what I used to do, is just click on
the layer mask, get a black brush and just go all the way around trying to get rid of
it.
That's a real difficult way of doing things, you've got to be very, very good with the
brush not to keep painting away too much.
Here's a really quick way of getting rid of it.
All we need to do is click on the layer mask itself.
I'm going to hold down my Alt or Option key, click on the thumbnail of the layer mask to
go in into the layer mask view.
Let's just zoom out just a touch.
Now the haloing is only appearing really on the walking stick and parts of the body.
What I'm now going to do, is get my lasso tool and make a very rough outline of the
body part and the walking stick.
Basically, what I'm now doing is telling Photoshop to ignore everything else except what's going
to be within this area that I'm drawing an outline around, something like that.
You can see I'm not bothering with including the head and the hair.
We took quite a bit of our time to get that to look good, there's no haloing on that.
It's just on the body and the walking stick.
Now that we've got the outline on it, we're going to go to the filter menu.
Choose blur and gaussian blur.
In the dialogue box here, just a one pixel radius of blur is all we need to add and just
click "Okay".
That's a really important step there, because the next thing we'll do, if you haven't added
any blur into it, it will look really obvious and the selection and cut out would look razor
sharp and just not realistic at all.
Now that we've done the blur, keep the selection active, hold down your Alt or Option key and
click on the layer mask thumbnail in the layers panel.
Just to go back to the color view like so.
The actual layer mask is still active, we can see the frame going around it.
Let's just zoom in, as we can see those halos nice and clear.
Then we're going to go to "Image adjustments and levels".
We're not going to use a "Levels adjustment" layer from the right hand side over here.
We're going to go to the image menu, choose "Adjustments and levels".
Then all we're going to do is grab the black point here, the shadows.
We're going to click on it and drag it in towards the right hand side.
As I do that, keep an eye on the halo or the outline going around the walking stick and
on the shoes in the bottom of his trousers.
The more I drag it in, you'll start to notice that the halo starts to disappear.
We bring it in just a little bit more to around about there.
Now, look, I'll zoom in just a little bit more, and you can see how it's completely
gone from the back of his trousers, his shoes and on the walking stick.
Let's just bring that black point back again.
This was before, and here now is you drag it across, you don't have to go all the way
across, just again a little bit of time.
Take it as far as is needed, you don't need to go excessive.
Just around about there is absolutely fine and you can see that it's gone.
All we've literally done there on the layer mask, we've moved the black point over to
add more black into the layer mask.
What that's basically doing is, it's crushing down on the selection of Dave's body and as
it's doing that, it's compressing it, and compressing it, and compressing it.
It's eventually that black is covering over the halo that you had going around the walking
stick and the body.
Click "Okay".
Let's just double click on the hand in the toolbar to go back to full view, select and
deselect.
There you go, that's just a very, very quick work flow to show you how I think I get the
best results when using the quick selection tool.
Hope it's useful to you.
The picture here, keep an eye out because I'll have that finished hopefully later on
today.
There's a few extra little things I need to do, now that we've dropped him in into the
scene.
Keep an eye on it, but hope you liked it.
If you have not subscribed to the channel, make sure you do it, spread the love and I'll
see you next time.