Hi.
Welcome back to the PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com.
I'm Jesus Ramirez.
In this video
I'm going to show you a quick and easy way
to remove white backgrounds in Photoshop.
This technique is perfect for when you are working with stock images
that have isolated backgrounds.
Okay, let's get started.
So, we're gonna work with
this background and this stock photo of a tractor with a white background of course,
and the tip that I have for you today deals with the magic wand tool.
So, we're not using the quick selection tool
and we're not using Adobe's artificial intelligence,
Adobe Sensei, to select the subject.
So, just to show you what that means is that with the quick selection tool active you can
click on select subject
and it'll make a selection, and the selection's actually quite good.
But, not good enough because we still get a lot of white
in between the wheels and other areas of the tractor.
So, there's actually a tool that we can use that is much older than Adobe Sensei, it's
perhaps Photoshop's first selection tool that will give us a better result and the fact
that it's so limited is why it works so good in this case.
And I'm of course talking about the magic wand tool,
which allows me to click on a pixel and I select similar pixels.
And what you wanna do is set your sample size, so this is either the same pixel you click
on or an average of three pixels by three pixels, or five by five and so on.
In this case you can just select point sample because when you click on white you'll select,
of course, other white pixels.
Then you can set your tolerance which simply means how closely related to the pixel that
you click on Photoshop is going to select.
You can go from zero, which means exactly the pixel you click on, or 255 which means
basically every pixel in the image.
So, if I were to click on the image now it selects the entire layer.
See that?
And the reason that we're going from zero to 255 is because those are the luminance
values of RGB 8-bit images.
So if I double click on the Foreground Color Picker, you'll see the RGB values here.
And if I go up
you'll see that the highest number is 255,
and the lowest number I can possibly get is of course, zero.
So, that's why we can go from zero to 255.
In this case we don't want to use zero because we don't want to just select white, we also
wanna select colors that are just off-white.
That way we avoid some of that fringing around the edges of the selection.
So, I'll set the tolerance to five.
Then, I'll make sure that anti-alias is checked.
That simply creates smooth edges, and I'll make sure that contiguous is unchecked.
Contiguous means that you can select pixels of a certain color that are touching.
So if I click on this red here, you'll notice that I'll just select that area here of that
shade of red, but those pixels are touching.
They're contiguous, they're next to each other.
If I uncheck that and click on that same area I'll select the pixels that are of that same
color anywhere on this layer.
So, make sure that that's unchecked, and now we can simply click on the white background
and we'll make a selection.
Then, you can hold Shift and click on the transparency, if I disable the background
you'll notice that this is transparency.
So I'm holding Shift then clicking to add to the selection and I'll enable the background
just so we can see how this works.
If I were to just come into the layers panel and click on the layer mask icon I will of
course create a layer mask.
But I want the opposite of that and the easiest way of creating an inverted layer mask is
to hold Alt, Option on the Mac, when you're clicking on the Layer Mask icon and that completely
removes the background.
Notice that by using this technique we got into those hard to really places in between
the wheels and in other areas of the layer.
So I'm gonna fit this to screen and we can further fine-tune the selection by just zooming
in so we can see the edges.
And then with the layer mask selected you can click on selected mask which brings up
a workspace where you can fine-tune the mask.
This tutorial is not about the Select and Mask Workspace so I'm not gonna go into too much detail,
but you can watch one of my tutorials where I cover every single tool and slider in this workspace.
I highly recommend it.
I'll place a link right below under the description.
But, in this image we're going to start by smoothing the edges of the mask.
They're a bit rough, so I can just increase the smoothing just a tiny bit and maybe add
just a tiny little bit of feather to blur the edges, again just a tiny little bit, and
I can Shift the edge inward like so.
And you can of course keep fine-tuning the selection until you find something that works
for your image.
When you're done you can press okay, and double-click on the hand tool to fit the image to screen,
and you can see that just like that we were able to remove the white background from the image.
Now, obviously this image needs a little bit more work, we need to add shadows and we need
to color match the image so that it feels that it's really in that environment.
We're not gonna cover that in this tutorial, but I will place links down below for two
videos that you can watch.
A tutorial on color matching that I highly recommend.
It's only 90 seconds long but it's really powerful and it will help you with every composite,
so check it out right after this video.
And also you can check out this video where I show you how to create shadows in Photoshop
including a technique that most people don't know.
And, before we finish the tutorial I would like to say thank you so much for sticking
with PTC this year.
This is going to be the last tutorial of the year, so I just wanna say happy new year and
thank you so much for all your support.
If you're new to the Photoshop Training Channel then don't forget to click on that subscribe
and notification buttons.
Thank you so much for watching.
I'll talk to you again in the next tutorial.