in this video i'll demonstrate an easy way to remove the background from an image in photoshop
and i'll be doing this with an often overlooked tool here's my starting image which i downloaded
from a stock library what i want to do is cut out the lady and desk to remove the background from
the photo the way that i'll do this is using the object selection tool which was released
in november 2019 you'll find the tool in the tools palette because it's one of three tools in a group
you may find that either the quick selection or the magic wand tool icon is visible if you
can't see the object selection tool right click on the group to display all the tools you can
then click the tools icon photoshop then analyzes your image trying to detect objects in the frame
you'll know that it's doing this because the arrow icon in the toolbar spins you can also
click this icon at any time to refresh the object detection this is something that you may want to
do if you change settings like sample all layers and hard edges when the analysis is complete you
can see the objects photoshops found by clicking the show all objects icon you then see a dark
overlay appear on the different objects let's turn that off now by clicking it again because
there's another way by moving your mouse over the image you can highlight the individual objects
if i move my mouse over the laptop in the image it turns dark because photoshop
recognized it as an object i can then click to select the object and photoshop converts it
into a selection you'll then see the marching ants appear to indicate that it's an active selection
in this image photoshop has found several objects that we want to select but when i click on another
of these it selects that object and removes the selection from the laptop that's because i'm
using this option to create a new selection with each click the other icons next to this are to
add subtract and intersect the selections by using the add option i can click on different objects in
the scene and add them to the current selection unfortunately there is something missing from
this tool which is the option to display a mask or overlay rather than the selection when you
choose multiple objects the marching ants make it difficult to see what is and isn't selected
this can make finding and fixing problems quite difficult shortly i'll show you what i think is
a better option but first let's try to clean up this selection notice this mode drop down
in the toolbar you can use it to select either a rectangular marquee or a lasso tool to work with
so far we've been clicking on objects to select them but we can also draw around areas using these
settings i tend to use the lasso tool because it's more flexible let's zoom in to 100 to look the
image over for problems if there's an area that's been missed i can draw around it with the lasso
photoshop then analyzes the area and hopefully adds it to the selection
sometimes it doesn't quite get it right and you just need to make another selection
it's also possible to remove areas by clicking the subtract option icon in the toolbar when you think
you have the selection correct it's best to check it what i'm going to show you next is my preferred
method of checking and refining the selection typically i only use the select subject tool to
make an initial selection after that i switch to the selector mask environment to refine it
i find it's better because it has a colour overlay where you can easily see what is and isn't
selected it also includes other selection tools to help you refine or make more complex selections
looking at this image the selection looks pretty good and it would be fine to use it for something
like a youtube thumbnail let's zoom in with the magnify tool to check the edges of the selection
for more detail problems i'll use this to show you a couple of tools that you might want to use
let's start by cutting off the top of the cup so that it will be easier to remove later
because the desk has a straight edge i can use the polygon lasso tool this is great for drawing
a straight edge between two points i'll set it to subtract from the selection in the toolbar
then i can add my points around the top of the cup to remove it
now i'll check around the edge of the woman and use the refine
edge brush to clean up areas like the hair
when you're happy with the selection choose to output it to a new layer with a layer mask this
duplicates the image layer that you're working on and adds a mask to it created from the selection
having a new layer and mask is going to allow you to refine the selection further if you need to
now if i hide the background layer you can see the woman and desk with
the background removed you may find this is good enough for what you have in mind
but just in case a good way to check the quality of the selection is by viewing the mask
hold down the option key or alt key on a pc and click on the mask thumbnail in the layers window
because the mask is black and white it makes it easy to spot any problems you can then clean those
up with the brush tool by painting with black or white often you'll find areas where the edge
isn't sufficiently well defined but if you try to paint too close to these to improve them you can
easily make a mistake a neat trick to fix these edges is to switch the brush to painting with the
overlay mode when i paint over a white area of the mask with white it removes any black in that area
you can also paint over black areas of the mask using black to remove any white because you're
using the overlay mode it doesn't really matter if you spill over because you won't affect the
opposite color that you're painting with if you use this technique try not to have the brush
set to 100 opacity it can make the edges look a little false when you do run into this problem
try painting over that area of the mask with the photoshop blur tool
a small amount of blur applied to the edge of the mask is often enough to soften the effect
after removing the background from the image with a mask you can try adding other backgrounds
for example we can move this lady to a new working location like the beach
and i'll remove the pens and coffee cup from the desk as well
i hope you've enjoyed the demonstration if you did you might like this video where i explain some
of the problems i found when trying to use the photoshop sky selection tools