Change The Background of your Pictures, Create Old Masters Look, Photoshop Tutorial

hey guys irene here welcome back to my youtube channel today i'm gonna show you guys how i removed the background from my recent images and replaced it with these artworks creating a very painterly old masters type of look to my images now before we start with the photoshop tutorial let's talk a little bit about where do you find these gorgeous backdrops for your images and most importantly how do you make sure that they are free for you to use without infringing anyone's copyright my absolutely favorite resource is actually the met museum's website so go to madmuseum.org i will leave the link in the description down below now we're going to click to art and art collections now in the search bar you can go ahead and type whatever you're looking for so for me i'm looking for some flower backdrops so i'm going to type in flower now once your search appeared here make sure that you choose open access open access actually means that you can use these artworks in your own photography without worrying about infringing any copyright so as long as you're looking through open access you're good to go now i also like to choose the artworks with the image and on the type of the image i like to choose painting but definitely feel free to look through all of different categories that they have on their websites there are so many artworks to choose from it's quite addicting just scrolling through the resources they have and trying to figure out what you can use in your own art so the painting i decided to use for these particular images was peacock and holly hogs by bien liu i will leave the specific link for this specific picture as well if you would like to use it as you can see here it says public domain so again you know that you can use this image without any worries so now to download it you're just going to click this button right here which brings the image in its full quality and then you can just right click save image as and then proceed to save the image whatever you would like now after downloading the image i can import it into photoshop and start working with it i'm going to show you guys two different ways to remove the backdrop the first one is my favorite one it is extremely simple it's perfect for beginners and the second one is a little bit more complex a little bit more professional so let's start with the first one here's the backdrop that we're using i'm gonna click this selection tool and right click on the image press duplicate the layer and then choose the image that we're going to be duplicating it on now we can right click again and choose free transform this time to stretch it out and fit into our size okay this looks pretty good now i'm gonna go ahead and play around with blending modes this will make the image fit into your original one a little bit nicer so one of my favorite ones is soft light hard light looks good sometimes as well multiply is not bad screen works good uh you can go ahead and play around with different blending modes and the ones that are gonna work is gonna depend on the lightness of the image that you are using or the darkness of the background that you originally have in the image so you really have to kind of play around here to see what works for this one i think soft light works the best so that's what i'm gonna choose now i'm gonna apply a layer mask to the background and what this does is pretty much allows me to delete that top layer of certain spots and i'm gonna delete it off of my model now to delete you're going to choose this black color right here take your brush and you can just start brushing it on on places where you do not want that new background to be so i'm just taking it off of the model now when you do this always make sure that you're using a soft round brush to avoid any harsh edges this one is my favorite soft round pressure brush because i'm actually using a tablet which allows me to adjust the pressure another thing that is so important when you're editing i 100 recommend getting a tablet if you do edit professionally if this is your job get a tablet it's going to make your work so much easier so anyways i'm just deleting with the black color here the background off of my model now if you do not have the tablet i would recommend doing this on a lower opacity or just kind of taking your time doing this accurately so there we go i'm just deleting it off until it looks good kind of going in on the hair now if you feel like you messed up like here i went a little bit too far you can switch back to uh to white pick up your brush and then start painting it on so the white will add that back drop onto the image and the black will subtract it i'm gonna add it a little bit more in here in the little spaces between the hairs a little bit over here as well and then take it off a little bit as well all right so yeah so this is before and after as you can see we replaced the backdrop pretty easy so this is a super beginner kind of technique that's very easy to understand and for everyone to use let me show you a little bit more of a professional one i'm gonna hide this layer for right now and on my original background layer i'm gonna duplicate it so i'm just gonna move it right here into that plus and it will duplicate my layer so now we're going to go to windows and open properties and this technique will only work on the newer versions of photoshop so photoshop 2020 and 2021 if you have anything below that you will not have this option so right here on the quick actions you're just gonna press it open and you'll see remove background and select subject and we're going to use remove background alright so as you can see it created a layer mask with the removed background and now if i make this layer visible and i move it in between as you can see it just replaced the background so super easy but there are some areas where it didn't do a very very good job i mean the computer is doing the job for you so of course it's not going to be super accurate so we're going to go back into that selection and we're going to refine it just a little bit so we're going to press select and mask so it's going to take you to this window and currently i have it selected to the color view uh but you might not have it like that if this is the first time you've been using it you might have it on the ants or the onion skin so just press this little button right here and i mean you can play around with it you can choose white but i personally like the color overlay so that i can see my selection really really well and now that we have it we can see that there's some areas where it's not very nice especially around her hair so we will fix that very easily with this brush right here so this is a refine edge brush right here you can see refine edge brush tool we're going to use it with the plus to make sure that we refine some of the edges of the hair so all you have to do just brush it on just brush it on on the hair and whenever it's not looking the greatest okay i'm gonna brush it on just a little bit over here as well a little bit over there a little bit here if you did a little bit too much you can always go to the minus tool and kind of bring back some of the background just gonna be very light-handed here here i select a little bit too much of that hair with the shoulder i'm gonna go over it with a smaller brush again now there's few places where the refine edge brush didn't really work for me like right here this rose randomly got selected so we're just gonna move on to the other brush tool and with the plus we're just gonna brush it on into the areas that are just kind of stubborn so there's a little bit here i missed this little spot right here with the refined brush so i'm gonna refine the edge here okay that looks good and i saw this little area that needs to be refined as well all right that looks that looks pretty good so i'm gonna zoom out now and now the last thing we can do here is feather out and smooth our selection so i'm gonna feather out about 3.6 pixels you can really play around here and see what works for you and i'm gonna smooth out the selection as well quite a bit and now make sure that your output is to a layer mask i had it on new layer before for some reason and it was creating a whole new layer that's not needed so make sure it's on layer mask and you can press ok now finally here's a few other things you can do to your background to make it fit with your image a little bit more so i'm gonna be using some adjustment layers on just the background itself uh to do that i'm gonna press right here to create my adjustment layer i love using levels selective color color balance i mean you can experiment here but these are some of my favorites so let's start with levels okay so make sure that this layer is directly above your background okay don't put it all the way up here it has to be above that new background that we've put in okay so now you're gonna right click on that new adjustment layer the levels in our situation and you're gonna press create clipping mask and as soon as you did that you're gonna see this little tiny arrow going down the clipping mask means that you're going to be affecting only the layer below the levels so we're going to be only affecting this new background layer right here all right so let's go back to our levels and what we can do here uh we can make the highlights a little bit brighter that looks pretty good we can experiment with the brightness of the whole image itself we can make the shadows not as dark or we can get those highlights darker you can experiment here with different uh colors like adding red that actually looks pretty good i like that the red looks really nice um so yeah so that's levels let's add another one let's do a selective color so same thing create clipping mask and you have that arrow that appeared and just to let you guys know it's not going to be affecting the levels because levels is an adjustment layer it's empty as you can see there's white in here there's nothing there so it's only going to be affecting the background again so here on the selective layer what can we do we can go into neutrals and kind of play around with changing some colors maybe a little bit of a green yeah that looks pretty nice and as you can see it's only adjusting the background it's not adjusting the model herself okay okay let's do it like that now if you do want these to adjust the whole image itself just make sure that your uh layer is on top of everything so here let's do a color balance and as you can see it's on top of everything there's no clipping masks and then when i move it it adjusts the whole image on its own so this is it i hope you guys enjoyed it if you do use any of my tips and tricks i mentioned in this video don't forget to tag me on instagram or facebook i would love to see what you guys create uh don't forget to give this video a like subscribe to my channel hit the bell and i'll see you guys in my next one bye

Channel: Irene Rudnyk

Views: 67,092

Keywords: photography, model, irene rudnyk, photographer, professional, tutorial, canon, 85mm 1.2, photoshoot, session, photoshop, background, met museum, open source, copyright free, replace, remove, backdrop, selection. cut out model, begginer, retouch, wacom tablet, hair selection, bts, lighting, old masters look, painterly portrait, painting, painted backdrop look, lightroom, easy, learn, teach, cool

Id: EyUyEFIoEoU

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021