How To Easily Remove a Background in GIMP {And, Retain Hair Detail} /// Step-by-Step Instructions

hello my name is chris parker and i'm here to help you achieve your creative vision by mastering and i'm going to help you get one step closer to that with today's editing tutorial so let's take a look at the image we're going to be working on and what we're going to learn how to do so here's the portrait with the original background and once we're done we're going to have a new one just like that now take a closer look at her hair right here we have some stray hairs and we can see the background peeking through those stray hairs even after replacing the background those stray hairs are still there and we can see the background through them even with the new background how cool is that so that's what you're going to learn how to do today if you want to follow along and practice what you learned and use this same image go ahead and find a link to download the image in the description below and open it up in and we'll go ahead and get started so the first thing we want to do is work non-destructively by duplicating this layer now the key for this particular edit is making a selection of the background so we can swap it out with a new one and the tool of choice for today is the foreground select tool so we can find that tool under our free select tool right here just click and hold your mouse button and grab your foreground select tool right here now we're not going to go into a lot of detail about this tool in particular because i've already done another tutorial that's gone over how to use the foreground select tool in great detail basically the foreground select tool will separate the foreground and the background once we tell where those two sections of the image are so let's go ahead and make our first selection by clicking and drawing around our subject here and creating an outline like this now we don't need to get right along the edge real tight because is going to do its magic and its algorithm to determine where that background is as well as the foreground because what it's going to do is is going to analyze the area that we target for it and it's going to review the colors the textures and the contrast to determine the two points of the image the foreground and the background let's come right back to the beginning where we started here once we see that yellow circle release your mouse button and that's going to close out the selection and then we need to hit our enter or return key and we get this blue mask overlay over our image and the dark blue represents the background and inside we have the foreground but now we need to tell exactly where the foreground is or at least the data the texture and the contrast is within the foreground and we're going to target that area with a brush tool which is automatically selected after you apply that overlay so now we can begin painting over the area where the foreground is so we can tell okay that is the foreground but first i'm going to lower the size of my brush with my stroke width right here in the tool options to right around 200 or so so i have a smaller brush to work with initially so i can get in tight around our subject now i don't need to get in real tight and grab all those individual stray hairs because is going to analyze the colors and the textures and the contrast and it's going to know that that hair is part of the selection we're just creating an initial point for to analyze the data so it can then work its magic to select our subject accordingly now once we release our mouse button the underlying image is revealed and that overlay or that mask is removed we're now going to go in with a larger brush right around 600 or so so we can cover more area and this will give more information for to work with to determine what's included in the foreground of our image again once we release that overlay will be removed and then we can come up here and click on the select button here so can do its algorithm calculation for the two different areas it'll take a few seconds to a few minutes depending on the speed of your computer and we're left with a selection around our subject now if you wanted to you could zoom in here to see that those individual stray hairs are selected it's not 100 perfect but does a pretty good job initially we're just going to fine tune what didn't get correct in just a moment first we're going to remove the background i'm going to go ahead and turn off these two layers here you don't have this one because i've already worked on this image file already and i have all my edits inside of here so i'm gonna grab my top layer here make sure it's selected we're gonna click on this little icon right here to add a layer mask you want to make sure you have selection chosen that way the selection is kept intact and then the background is removed so watch this drum roll please we're going to click on add and boom our background is gone how cool is that all right we don't need our selection anymore so we're going to go up here to select and click on none to deselect let's grab our zoom tool here and we're going to zoom in here because we have parts of the old background in the image still so i can see it right here down here at the bottom looks like i'm missing part of the arm and the elbow as well let's check on this side and this side looks pretty good so we need to clean up the edit here because didn't do a perfect job that's fine because we have a layer mask that will allow us to fine-tune this particular edit or this part of the edit so i'm going to grab my paint brush tool with the letter p and then i can paint with black so make sure your foreground color is set to black and then when i paint over an area it will be removed i need to increase my opacity because i have it a little bit lower than 100 percent we're going to keep it at 100 just for the moment and then we're going to paint with white i'm going to click right here to switch the foreground color to white and then i'm going to paint in this area to bring back part of that arm so white adds black removes okay i'm going to press the letter x to swap the background and foreground color again so i can paint with black to remove this part of the image now it gets a little bit trickier because we have a lot of stray hair here with the background showing through here and in other parts of the hair so the secret for this edit is lowering the opacity down to we're going to start with around 20 percent and then i'm going to change my force which is usually set to the default of 50 way down to around 10 to 15 which is going to lower the density of this edit or how much of the edit is being applied that way we can gradually build up the edit slowly which is going to help us retain the stray hairs so watch this this is pretty cool i'm going to come in here and i'm going to paint a couple times right here click drag click drag and you can see that the hair is being retained but the background is being removed how cool is that i love it all right so that's the secret to keeping the fine detail of stray hairs like that by slowly removing the background which helps retain the detail so i'm just going to do a few more spots here i'm not going to work on this and make it perfect right now because we have a couple other things to cover and i don't want you to be here all day now that you know the secret of retaining fine hair detail i'm going to show you how to add in a new image so i'm going to go ahead and zoom out with command or control plus shift plus the letter j which automatically zooms all the way out now i have another image that i've provided again in the description below go ahead and download that image or use any image of your choice locate that image that you downloaded click on it and drag it over your canvas and it will automatically be added as a new layer i'm going to go ahead and grab my zoom tool with the letter z hold down my control key so i can zoom out with one click and then we need to resize our image here or our new background larger with our scale tool so that's shift plus s to get the scale tool or just located on your toolbar right here i'm going to click and drag this corner up and then this one down so it's larger than my canvas i'm going to click scale so it can be resized and then i'm going to move that layer down by clicking on this icon right here and boom we have a new background let's make this background look a little bit more realistic or more natural by blurring it out just a little bit to add some more separation between our portrait or our subject and the background so to do that we're going to go up to filters blur gaussian blur and then i'm going to increase this to maybe right around 10 maybe a little bit more all depends on your creative vision and what you think looks good so actually i'm going to go right around 20. so click your preview button right here and you can see the before and after and that adds a little bit more separation between the foreground and the background now before we finish up i just want to retouch the hair just a little bit so i'm going to go ahead and grab my zoom tool and click and drag around her face here so i can zoom in a little bit because i have some areas here on the right side and probably up here on the top that's pretty dark compared to the rest of her hair now i'm not sure if that's the hair or the background itself but i want to get rid of some of that so i'm going to grab my layer mask here my brush again with the letter p and then i can paint with black to remove parts of her hair on this side to help it look a little bit more natural i'm gonna go ahead and increase my brush size here and i'm doing that with my scroll button on my mouse and i'm gonna go ahead and begin painting over these areas here actually i'm going to undo that with commander control plus the letter z and turn off my background layer here so i can see what i'm doing a little bit better and now you can see the areas that are much darker than the rest of her hair and again with the lower opacity we can continue clicking and dragging and building up the edit so we can kind of blend in that hair a little bit more versus just erasing it all together so i'm gonna go ahead and go around the top of her head here if you hold down your spacebar key that will allow you to click and drag on the canvas to move it over so just another way of navigating around your canvas versus doing it with the scroll bars on the sides so that's looking pretty good i'm gonna go ahead and turn this background layer on again and i'm gonna go ahead and zoom a little bit more because it looks like i have some stray hairs here that are not connected with the rest of her hair here so i'm gonna go ahead and get rid of those completely i'm going to increase my opacity again just a little bit higher so i can work a little bit faster on these stray hairs right here so that's looking pretty good let's go ahead and zoom all the way out with ctrl shift plus the letter j and let's take a look at our before and after i'm going to go ahead and turn on the original image layer here and take a look at the before and after by turning off the new background layer how cool is that

Channel: Parker Photographic

Views: 40,828

Keywords: gimp editing photos, gimp editing photos tutorial, gimp editing, gimp photo editing, remove background in gimp, transparent background gimp, remove background gimp, remove anything, photo editing, gimp remove background, foreground select tool, gimp remove background from image

Id: RVDsVe3nJ1U

Length: 12min 27sec (747 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021