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- What about those situations
where you want to remove the entire background altogether
and do something different?
Well, that's exactly what we'll do here
with this photograph.
We'll look at how we can remove the subject
from his background, bring in another one,
and then add some other creative elements as well.
All right, well, this project begins
with using what's called the quick select tool.
You can find that in the tools panel right here.
Go ahead and click on that
and then position your cursor over the image
and just start to click and drag over the photograph.
This allows you to build up a selection.
And here I'm going to go ahead
and click and drag over the image.
Make sure I'm selecting everything.
And sometimes what you may need to do
is change your brush size
when you're working with this tool.
Here I'll tap the left bracket key
to make my brush really small.
Just want to make sure I have all of the hat
and maybe a little bit of the eyelashes there selected.
I want to make sure I have the top of the hat
selected as well.
Now, if we move down and zoom out,
we can use a bigger brush, tap the right bracket key,
and just go ahead and paint over the areas
that you want to select.
And the great thing about this tool, as the name implies,
it allows you to work really quickly.
Now, the question is,
do we want the background here between his arm and his body?
No, we don't.
So you can either use the brush with the minus icon on it
or you can access that by holding down
the option key on a Mac, alt on Windows.
So either way, just click on the icon above
or use that modifier shortcut key.
And in this case, you can see
we have a pretty good rough selection of the subject.
Well, after we've done that using quick select,
the next step, well, actually, before I leave
I notice I missed an area right here.
So let me just use this brush and click on that
and just double check all my edges,
looking around the image.
Okay, now, after we've done that,
the next step is to go to the select and mask dialog.
So here we click on select and mask.
This brings us into this area
and we can view this a couple different ways.
Here I'm going to view this on a solid white background.
What it's showing me here is that if we zoom in,
I missed a little bit of the hat.
So we can use this tool which is quick select
and just click and drag over that, right?
So I want to make sure I have that area selected.
Also, I have a little bit of the front of the hat missing.
So I'm going to go ahead and click on that too.
And then if I need to subtract,
just go ahead and use the brush
just like we've done before with the minus icon.
So it's a little bit of back and forth, right?
Just making sure
that you're getting your selection just right.
All right, well, here,
I'm having some trouble with that area.
So I'll zoom in closer, make my brush even smaller,
paint away the problem area on both sides,
and then go back with the brush with the plus icon
and bring back the good part of the hat there.
Okay, well, the edges are a little bit jagged and whatnot.
That's okay 'cause we can fix that
with our radius in smart radius.
What this does is it tells Photoshop
to pay attention to the edges that we have.
Next, we can smooth things out a little bit
and we can also add a little bit of contrast
which gives some definition there.
And then I'll shift the edge, touch to the left.
Now we can see there's some problem
with the mustache kind of beard area.
If you use this tool, it's a great one for working on areas
where you have transparency.
And you can see, as I click over these areas,
essentially, I'm able to bring in
a little bit more of the beard on top of the background.
I want to increase the contrast a little more
to add more density to that area.
Still though there's some red in that.
To get rid of that, we'll use decontaminate colors
and that will help to get rid of a lot of the red fringing
that we're seeing around the image.
So here, I just want to look around the photograph.
It's looking really good.
I think we're going in a nice direction.
Next step, we want to decide how do we want to output this.
And here we'll choose new layer with a layer mask.
And then click okay.
And what this will do is it will give us this new layer
where we have the subject by himself
and we also have a layer mask.
And the reason why it's nice to have a layer mask is
if we zoom in to the hat area,
I notice that my hat isn't super good with the mask.
So I have a brush which is either white or black,
so we can choose one of those.
And I can mask away a little bit of that problem area
or paint with white.
And I can bring back some of the actual hat there.
So sometimes that's helpful to be able to fine tune
or clean up an edge
where you might have a little problem issue.
Now, that being said, that was kind of going
over and above the call of duty,
but still it's helpful to know
that we can modify things in that way.
All right, well, step one is complete.
We have successfully removed the subject
from his environment.
Now we need a new background.
How can we bring one in?
We have another image open.
And if we go to window and then arrange
and choose an option like two up vertical,
we can see the images that we have open here side by side.
One of them's a concrete wall,
photograph of a concrete wall.
The other one is our portrait.
So if I want to bring this concrete wall over,
just click on that and drag and then drop,
and that will bring it over.
So that's what I'm going to do, drag and drop that over.
Now, back over here,
the problem is the concrete wall is on top of the subject.
So I'm going to go ahead and put that behind the subject.
Now we can see, we have our guy
and we have this concrete wall, which is behind him.
Next step for me is going to be to change the composition.
For this project,
I need to have more space on this side of the frame.
One way that you can add more canvas size to your image
is with the crop tool.
We select the crop tool.
Make sure delete crop pixels is unchecked
and content aware is unchecked.
And then here I'll just click and drag this out.
And the reason why I'm doing this
is I want to have more space over here
on this side of the image.
So you can see how we've now added that behind our subject
and extended the canvas.
And the reason why I wanted to do this,
let me zoom out a touch, is so that we have some space
to add a few other creative elements as well.
(upbeat music)