Hi.
Welcome back to The Photoshop Training Channel.
I'm Jesus Ramirez.
In this video, I'm going to show you two powerful methods to cut out trees in Photoshop.
The techniques that you're going to learn in this video could be used on anything, not just trees.
These are two very powerful techniques that you should know.
Okay. Let's get started.
We're going to dive right in, and I'm going to show you a method that you probably don't
know, unless of course, you watched The Photoshop Training Channel.
I've used a similar method in a previous tutorial,
but it's a powerful method, and I really think that you should know it.
Anyway, if you want to mask out or cut out this tree, one of the easiest ways of doing
it is with the Blend If options.
If I double-click to the side of the layer, I bring up the Layer Style window.
In this window, I have something here called Blend If.
If you don't know what Blend If is, I have a full crash course video on just this option.
So, I'm not going to spend too much time explaining it, but if you're interested, I'll place a
link down below in the description to that video where I explain everything about.
But we can use the luminosity of the layer to show or hide pixels, or we can select different
channels to show or hide pixels.
So, in the Blend If option, I have the gray, red, green, and blue.
These are channels, of course, and gray is just luminosity.
So, if I look at my image and think of what I want to hide, in this case the sky because
I want to cut out the tree.
So, I want to hide the sky.
Then out of all these options, blue is the better one because the sky is blue.
So, the blue channel contains a lot of information relevant to the pixels that we're trying to select.
And you'll be able to better see the channel
in the second example when we actually work with the channels.
So, we can use this channel to hide or show pixels.
So, if I select blue,
then I can use the "This layer" control
or the "Underline layer" control
to show or hide pixels.
In this case, we only have one layer, so we're going to work with the "This layer" control.
I want to hide the blue pixels, so that I can select everything that is not blue.
So, I can click on this point, which controls the blues, and drag it to the left.
And notice that when I do, I immediately hide the sky because the sky is blue.
I hold Alt option on the Mac, and click on this point to split it in half, and I can
create a smoother transition.
Basically what this is doing is that anything that is this level of blue or brighter will be hidden.
Everything in this area will be a smooth transition,
and everything from this point to the left will be 100% visible.
So, once I press OK, notice now that I no longer have a sky.
If I create a new solid color adjustment layer.
And I'll just make it gray, press okay, and drag it to the bottom of the layer stack.
You can see now that the sky was removed.
Now, this is not really transparency and it's not really a cutout yet, because if you look
at the layer thumbnail, you can actually still see the sky.
We're hiding those pixels based on the luminesce value of the that channel.
So, if we create an adjustment layer such as the exposure adjustment layer, click on
this icon to clip it to the layer below, so that it only will fix the tree layer, notice
what happens when I change the exposure.
The sky comes back.
See that?
Or I can hide more of the layer because when I change the luminosity of the layer, it also
changes the luminosity of the channel, the blue channel, which is what Blend If is using
to create transparent pixels.
So, if we change the luminosity, we change which pixels are transparent and which are not.
Another way of knowing that this is not really transparency is if I press Ctrl, Command on
the Mac, and click on the layer thumbnail, I make a selection around the entire layer,
and not really the transparent pixels.
Even with this layer disabled, if I control click, nothing happens, I still select the entire layer.
So, I'm going to deselect the layer by pressing Ctrl D, Command D on the Mac,
and then just deleting this layer.
So, this is a trick that a lot of people don't know, including many professionals.
And I can guarantee you that you probably haven't seen it in too many tutorials, unless
of course, you watch The Photoshop Training Channel.
And that is if you right click on the layer, you can select convert to Smart Object, and
notice what happens to the layer thumbnail.
You can actually see transparency now.
So, if I press Ctrl, Command on the Mac, and click,
now I can actually make a selection out of those transparent pixels.
And if I create an exposure adjustment layer, clip it to the layer below, and adjust the
exposure, notice that now the sky doesn't come back.
So, that's the trick.
Making a Smart Object with Blend If.
And if you need to edit the transparency, just open up the Smart Object and edit the
Blend If.
What I'm going to do now is show you a second method.
This method is actually more well known, but I still think that it is a powerful method
that you should know because it can be very beneficial in some cases.
So, you can make complicated selections really easily by using the Channels panel.
You can see the three channels by clicking on them, red, green, and blue.
What you need to do is look at the channel that has the most contrast between the foreground
and background, in this case, the blue channel.
By the way, this is the same channel that we used in the Blend If example.
Notice what it looks like.
The sky is really bright and the tree is really dark.
So, all the relevant information, the blue pixels are almost completely while.
So, this is what Blend If was using.
So, we were simply telling Blend If to use this as reference for us to create the mask.
So, it might be a bit more clear now that you see the channel.
But anyway, select the blue channel, and click, and drag it into the new channel icon to duplicate
it.
What you need to do now is make solid black and solid white.
There's a lot of ways of doing that.
So, I'm going to show you several ways, and you use a technique that better works for
your image.
So, you can go into image, adjustment, and levels, and just make the darker pixels darker
by dragging the black point to the right, and make the brighter pixels brighter by dragging
the white point to the left like so, and press okay.
Another thing that you can do is simply make a selection out of things that should be a
solid color, in this case, solid black, then fill will that color.
Black is my foreground color, so I can press Alt and Backspace to fill with that color.
You could also use the Apply Image command.
So, you can go into Image, apply image, and you can use the blue copied channel, which
is selected by default, and apply it to itself using a blending mode.
In this case, screen is selected.
You can see the before and the after, or you can select Multiply.
In this case, I'll select Multiply just to make those darker pixels darker and fill those
areas in and press okay.
Another thing that you can do is use the dodge and burn tools, select the Dodge tool, make
sure that Highlights is selected, and you can paint to make the highlights brighter,
to make sure that there's no grays and it's completely white.
And you can select the Burn tool.
Make sure that Shadows is selected, and paint to make the shadows darker.
And finally, you can use the Brush tool,
and simply paint with black in areas that need to be black.
So, you can use the combination of all those techniques to make sure that the areas that
should be black are black, and the areas that should be white are white.
So, what we need to do now is think about what we want to select and what we want to deselect.
With a selection, white is selected, and black is not.
So, we want to select the tree and not select the sky.
What we have here is the opposite.
White is selecting the sky and not the tree.
So, you can simply press Ctrl I, Command I on the Mac, to invert, and that inverts those colors.
So now, the tree is selected and not the sky.
Now, you need to make a selection out of the bright pixels.
There's two ways of doing that.
You can press Ctrl, Command on the Mac, and click on the layer thumbnail to make a selection,
or you can look at the number next to the channel that you copied.
If you only have one channel copied, then it'll be Control 6.
So, you can press Control, Alt, and then that number 6 to load that channel as a selection.
So, Control, Alt, and then that number.
And by the way, if you wanted to select for example the red channel, you can press Ctrl,
Alt 3, Command Option 3 on the Mac, to select the bright pixels out of that channel.
But in this case, we want to select the blue copy, which is Ctrl 6.
So, Ctrl, Alt 6, Command Option 6 on the Mac.
So, with those pixels selected, I'm going to click on RGB, go back into the layers panel,
and simply create a layer mask.
And now, we have selected the tree very, very easily by using the channel's panel.
And we can do really cool things like bring in this sunset overlay, bring it below the
image that we're working with.
And then I can create a curves adjustment layer on top of that layer, clip it to the
layer below, so that we only effect the tree layer and not the background.
And I can just start darkening the image to create a really, really cool effect.
Then I can select the red channel.
And I'll click and drag from the center up to add more red light into this image to create this sunset effect.
By the way, if you want to learn more about cut outs and masking,
then check out my Advance Hair Masking tutorial.
I'll place a link right below in the description.
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Thank you so much for watching, and I will talk to you again very soon.