Let me show you how to change a background in Photoshop.
This tutorial will teach you everything you need to know
to create realistic background changes.
You will learn about masking matching,
perspective, color correction, and a whole lot more.
This tutorial is for beginners.
I will go slowly and explain everything in small digestible chunks.
Look in the description for the link for the practice file.
Let's jump right into the tutorial.
This is the image that we're going to work with.
The first step is to bring in the new background image.
To do so, you can go into File and select Place Embedded from here.
I'm going to select this image called Background and I'll click on Place.
Photoshop will bring that in and place it over my image.
I'm going to hold shift and click-and-drag
on the corner handles to scale the image so that it fills the entire canvas.
When you're done, you can tap on Enter or Return;
or click on the checkmark.
You can always double-click on the Hand Tool to fit the image screen.
Next, place the background layer below the runner layer.
Make sure that you unlock the layer
by clicking on the lock icon and dragging it up above the background.
You can double-click to rename the layer if you like.
I'll call this layer "Runner."
That way we stay organized and we know what each layer controls.
What we're going to do now is remove the background from this photo.
There are several ways to do it, but let me show you my preferred method.
You can go into the select menu and choose Select and Mask.
This Backspace is all about making Select and Mask.
Notice that the Runner layer is no longer visible.
That's because the Onion Skin mode hides pixels that are not selected by default.
The transparency should be at 50% and you will partly see the Runner.
The transparency slider controls
the visibility of the pixels that are not selected.
Once you select pixels, they will be viewed at 100% Opacity.
To create a selection, you can simply click on the Select Subject button.
This button uses machine learning technology, known as Adobe Sensei,
to analyze the image and automatically select the main subject.
As you can see, Photoshop does a fantastic job.
You can increase the transparency if you
like, so that you can see how the image will look up against your background.
What I like to do is go into the black
and white view so that I can better analyze my selection.
So, I'll click on the Zoom Tool and Zoom in and look at the edges.
Notice that the edges are quite jagged
under Global Refinements, you have control over the edges of the mask.
The first slider is the smooth slider, so when you click-and-drag to the right,
notice how those lines become much smoother and that's what you want.
I will also increase the contrast, which makes those edges sharper feather
simply means blur, so this will blur the edges.
I don't want that, so I'll leave that set
to zero and shift edge expands or contrast slider mask.
No need to do that in this case.
By the way, if you want to know how all the sliders and tools in this panel work,
then check out my video on the Select and Mask workspace.
The link is in the description.
Next, you can go back into the option skin mode to see what your image looks like so
far and you can double-click on the hand tool to fit the image to screen.
Another thing that you can do before you
leave this panel is make adjustments to your mask.
Notice that I have a hole here right
on her back and I can fix that by going into the brush tool.
Make sure that the add button is enabled
and click-and-drag to paint the missing pieces in your project.
Spend more time fine-tuning these minor details.
Also, we will work on our hair in a separate adjustment.
The refinements we have applied are global.
They affect all the mask edges the same, but you want to apply a different
adjustment to her hair to get better results.
To do so, Output To a Layer Mask and press OK.
This is the mask here.
It will hide, not delete the background.
You can always bring back the hidden pixels by painting with white on the mask.
Let's now finetune her hair.
Double-click on the mask to enter the selected mask workspace,
then enable the Refine edge tool and do one of two things.
Click on Refine hair so that Photoshop can refine the hair automatically,
or I'm going to undo that by pressing Ctrl Z and Windows Command Z on the Mac.
With this refinance tool selected,
you can click-and-drag and you can do it manually if you like.
Whatever you think works best for your image.
In this case, I'll click on refine here
and then with the brush tool, I can simply come back in and paint
the areas that I think are needed in my design.
For example, these highlights, they went away.
Photoshop thought that they were part
of the background so I can paint them back in my hand.
I'm not going to spend too much time working on small details in this tutorial,
but keep in mind that you will have to in your projects.
If you want to get good results when you're done, you can press.
Okay, okay. You can always select the Layer Mask
and paint with a brush tool using white to reveal or black to conceal,
so you can see here that by her eye, Photoshop removed some of those pixels.
So using white on this Layer Mask, I can paint to bring those pixels back.
See that it does a fantastic job.
And again you can paint in the details missing on the hair if some areas are too
difficult to select paint over them with black on the Layer Mask to hide them.
You don't have to keep every strand of hair.
This mask will be good enough for this tutorial.
At this point, you can select the Move Tool
from the toolbar and reposition the runner layer if you like.
I'll place her here on the right side and the image is looking great.
By the way, do me a favor.
If you see something in this video that you enjoy,
click on the "Like" button!
It really helps out the channel with the YouTube algorithm.
You now need to look for a few more things when changing the background in Photoshop
to get good results, your images may require more or even less
work, but I will show you some of the most common things that you need to look out
for when changing the background of your photos.
First, let's talk about lighting.
Notice how her left side of her face is bright and the right side is dark.
That's because we have a light source coming from the left-hand side.
But if we Zoom in,
you'll notice that the light source on the background is coming from the right.
The shadows are here on the left,
so the lights coming from the right side so the light sources need to match.
You can either flip the background or the foreground.
In this case, we'll flip the background,
so, select the background from the Layers panel,
then press Ctrl T on Windows, Command T on the Mac
to transform. Right-click and select "Flip Horizontal"
and you can adjust the background any way that you like.
So, I'll place the background here for now
and I'll click on the check Mark to commit the changes.
Another thing you need to match when
changing a background in Photoshop is perspective.
If you don't get the perspective right, then the image will not work.
What you need to do to match
the perspective is look at your original image.
You can disable the Layer Mask by holding shift and clicking on the mask.
The red X indicates that the mask is off
to better see the background, you can move the layer to the left.
Next, imagine your image without any buildings, streets, or anything else.
Just the ground and the sky.
Where do you think the ground will end and meet the sky?
Where is the horizon line?
I'll use a guide to have a visual representation.
These are the Rulers.
If you don't see them, you can press
Ctrl R on Windows Command R on the Mac
to enable them, and then you can drag down to place a guide.
You can place it wherever you think the ground plane meets the sky.
So, all this is sky up here all the way here and right about here is where the sky
would end and the ground plane would begin.
If you can't visualize that,
what you can do is follow the parallel converging lines and see where they meet.
That will be your vanishing point, and that will be where the horizon line sits.
You can do so by selecting the lines and with the line tool,
make sure that you change this option to shape and set the foreground color
to red, so that it's easy to see and follow the parallel converging lines.
So, there's one and there's another parallel converging line here.
You can follow that just to verify
from this point where they meet to see if all the other lines in the image match
and it looks like they sort of do that's more or less the vanishing point.
But notice that by eyeballing it I got pretty close.
So, if you want to, you can move this down into position.
You don't have to be precise.
As long as you're close enough, you should be good.
But now that we know where that horizon line is, we don't need these other lines.
We can just delete them so you can click on one hold shift, click on the last one.
They will all activate and you can just
tap on the Backspace key or the Delete key to remove them.
So, now I'm going to enable the background
again by holding the shift key and clicking and there's the background.
We now need to do the same thing with the background layer.
We need to figure out where the horizon line is.
You could follow the parallel converging
lines of the road, but in this case, it's not necessary just by visualizing
where the road would end and the sky would begin.
You can tell where the horizon line is.
So, with the Move Tool and the background selected,
I'm going to click and drag this down right about here.
This is more or less where the horizon line would be.
Remember, you don't have to be precise
and I'm going to select the runner and move her to the right next.
I need to fill the transparent pixels on top of this layer,
but before I do that, we need to get rid of this Smart Object.
If you look at this icon here, this represents a Smart Object,
which is a container that allows you to apply non-destructive effects.
I don't need it at the moment,
so, I'm just going to right click and rasterize the layer so that that is gone.
I can now select Rectangular Marquee Tool
and make a selection out of these transparent pixels on top.
Notice that I selected a few of the pixels of the sky.
Now I'm going to go into Edit Content-Aware Fill just to fill with those pixels
you can see in the preview window here that Photoshop will generate those pixels
that are very similar to the sky, and I can just Output To the Current Layer
and press OK, and you'll notice that Photoshop will just
magically extend that background, which is exactly what we want.
There's one more, very important component
that you need to look at and match when you change the background of an image
in Photoshop again, hold shift and click on the mask to deactivate it.
See how the image has a shallow depth of field.
You need to duplicate this effect on your background image by blurring it.
To do so, hold shift and click on the Layer Mask to enable it.
Then convert the background into a smart object to keep the blur editable.
So, with my background layer selected,
I'm going to go into Filter,
Blur Gallery and select Tilt-shift
So that you can see how this filter works.
I'm just going to increase the blur and notice what happens.
Everything in between these two solid lines is in focus.
Everything between the solid line
and the dashed line gradually becomes out of focus.
If you were to imagine how a lens will
blur the background, then you can probably figure out where to place the blur
basically where she's standing will be in focus and there will be a gradual
transition to a blurry background, but we can see the bottom part
of the image so the transition will not be very noticeable.
Start by dragging this point down to where
her feet will be.
Then drag the dashed line up.
Everything above this line will be entirely out of focus.
From this solid line up into this dashed line,
we will have a gradual transition of blurriness.
And obviously, that's way too much of a blur.
So, I can bring it down
and adjust it accordingly just so that we have something that looks realistic.
I think that it might still be a bit
blurry, so I'll bring it back down at about 14 pixels.
This looks pretty good and I will press OK, the next thing I want you to think
about is how your foreground and background images were shot.
They were probably shot at different times of day with varying lighting conditions.
You probably will need to do some color matching
to get things to look more realistic.
Again, every image will have different challenges and you will need different
techniques to solve those issues, but you can always start by going
into the new adjustment layer icon and selecting levels.
And with this adjustment layers, you can adjust the brightness
of the image, but we only want to adjust the runner and not the background to do
so, we can click on this icon to create what's known as a clipping mask.
That means that this adjustment layers
will only affect the layer below as indicated by this arrow.
So now I can make some adjustments.
I can brighten her up if I need to.
Obviously, you can spend more time fine tuning these small details.
Another thing that I would recommend that you do is go into the channels
and you have the red, the green and the blue channel,
and this will add or subtract color in that channel.
With the red channel we can drag to the left to add a little bit of red.
If we have to the right, we get the opposite color, which is Cyan.
So I'm just going to add a little bit of red.
Then I'm going to go into the blue
channel, and from here we can add blue or yellow, which is the opposite color.
So, I'm going to add a little bit of yellow to warm her up.
And just in case you're wondering, the green channels panel green or magenta.
When you change backgrounds in Photoshop, it's always a good idea to apply global
adjustments to bring all the images together and make them feel more cohesive.
You can do so by adding noise, a vignette, or applying a color grade.
For this image, we will try a global color adjustment.
You can go into the new adjustment layers, icon and choose color.
Lookup.
You can think of this adjustment layer mask, a filter that colors your image much
like an Instagram filter from the 3D LUT dropdown.
You can select any look that you want.
I'll tap on the down arrow key to toggle between the LUTs.
If you find one that you like,
but it's too intense, you can always reduce the opacity.
I think this one looks pretty good.
Once you're happy with how your image
looks, you can work on the fine details of the mask.
For example, in this image, the fingers need some work.
Remember, black conceals and white reveals on a Layer Mask.
So paint with black to hide the Pixel in between her fingers.
If you want to learn more about how
to change a background in Photoshop, then make sure to watch my
Photoshop Compositing Secrets video.
You can check it out here!
My name is Jesus Ramirez! Thank you so much for watching.