Erase Backgrounds in GIMP 2.10.28 with This Simple Workflow

hello and welcome back to another video my name is mike davies and in today's tutorial i'll be showing you a simple workflow for removing any background of a portrait photo i'll be using version 2.10.28 which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial [Music] before i get into that don't forget to check out my website at daviesmediadesign.com as always i have tons of free video tutorials on here you can check out my latest clips and i have tons of free software help articles so definitely check that out you can enroll in my 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy and i will include a discount link in the description of the video plus you can get more content by becoming a dmd premium member and i'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video here is the photo i'll be using for today's tutorial just come over here click the down arrow i went with the 1920x12 version if your computer can handle it go with the original size however this process will be pretty memory intensive and doesn't tend to work very quickly with larger images to begin with so i do recommend going with the large image if possible so just click free download so here is one rendition of this method i have the background removed here is another color background i used and of course here is the original so i'll start by opening up the original image so i'll just go to my file explorer and click and drag my image over here to the little wilbur icon and release and i will convert this to gimp's native srgb color space it doesn't really matter but i will do that first step is going to be to duplicate this image so just click the duplicate icon and double click on here and rename this bg removed hit the enter key and double click on the bottom layer and rename this original hit the enter key the first tool i'll be using for my workflow is the paths tool but like i said we'll be using a few different tools here so let's come over here to the path tool inside of my toolbox and what i'll do is hold ctrl zoom in i want to outline the main portion of my subject and then the main portions of the hair but not the details of the hair so really focus all of your efforts on the actual portion of the model until you get to the hair and then you're going to do the same thing over here so hold ctrl zoom out hold ctrl and zoom in using my mouse wheel i'm going to click off the canvas to start and then click up here and just click and drag my mouse and that's going to create a curve and then click up here so i'm going to have to adjust this handle so i'll click on the node and here's the handle right here i can click and drag the handle and now our curve looks a lot better so now we're just going to continue this on just click and drag to create curves and you can always click and drag the curve itself as well and then click and drag up here so once we get to the actual hair and let me make sure i'm actually inside of the strap there so hold ctrl zoom in once we get to the actual hair we don't need to worry as much about the details you know use the space bar to move up so we're just going to click around the hair very loosely this will save us some time and it'll increase the accuracy of the background removal so let's come over here to the nose i do want to take time on the nose because this is not going to be included when we select all the hair and hold control zoom in you can always click on a node like i've been doing and just reposition it if you need to and let's just continue and make sure i adjust this handle so the curve looks right i'm not going to keep this little area of hair because i found in doing this that it didn't really look great regardless of whether or not i kept it so i'm just going to leave it out and there we got the lips so i do have to correct this handle and i'm just very quickly clicking and dragging my mouse and once again once we get to the hair we can get a good chunk of it but we don't really need to worry about the details yet and once i get back here i do want to make sure that i spend time on the body here and hold control and zoom out and use the space bar to move around on the image the space bar is pretty much like the hand tool if i haven't already said that and let me come up top here and correct this and hold ctrl zoom out use the spacebar as the hand tool so now when i'm on my last note i'll hold the ctrl key and hover over the first note i created you'll see that my little mouse pointer will change so that means we're creating a union so i'll click on that and that's going to create a union between our first and last node so hold the space bar hold ctrl zoom in i also want to just select this area out so hold the shift key and click and then click and drag my mouse and just continue on like i would any other path just adjust the handle there hold ctrl and click click on this handle here hold control click and drag that handle out and there we go all right once that's done i'll come over here and click selection from path that'll give us a selection area let me grab the move tool and now i can come over here to the background remove layer right click and go to add layer mask we're going to choose selection here and click add and if i hide the original layer and hit ctrl shift a which is going to deselect that i can also go to select none you can see the body portion looks really good right now but the hair obviously looks weird so now we're going to get to the hair so let me unhide this and we're going to click back on the original layer so to select the finer details of the hair we're going to use what's called the foreground select tool and there's not really any program premium free otherwise that is good at selecting the finer details of hair in a photo that's kind of the holy grail of photo manipulation but does a pretty good job especially considering it's free software so let's come over here and we're going to click and hold on the third tool group and just hover your mouse over foreground select and release and i'm not going to select the entire model i'm just going to select the hair so hold ctrl and zoom in and i'm going to click and drag with the foreground select tool around the hair and one big tip here is i'm going to come inside once the nose interrupts the hair and then come back up and just connect this and release and i'll hit the enter key so anytime you have a disruption like this with the hair where you know part of the body is sticking out you want to just cut that off there you can always come back to the other parts of the hair later but that's just going to make it much easier for gimp's algorithm to detect the hair versus everything else anytime you include less colors in here it just makes it easier for the algorithm so that's what we're doing we're separating the colors of the hair from the rest of the body and now i'm going to increase the size of my brush that shows up here using the right bracket on my keyboard and by the way i have feather edges checked and the radius is set to three but now what i'll do is just click and drag my mouse and i'm just selecting all of the foreground areas here so just the hair and i'll decrease using the left bracket on my keyboard so i don't need to be too detailed with this process so once i have selected a fair amount here i'm just going to hit the enter key and as you can see it's already done a really good job of selecting the hair i'll hold ctrl and zoom in so if you see any areas any major areas overlapping with blue you can always just paint those in using the draw foreground tool there so let me hold ctrl zoom out and hold ctrl zoom in so this all looks pretty good to me maybe just paint this part in there we go so hold ctrl zoom out again and once you're ready just hit the enter key so there's our selection area it looks pretty off right now because you can see the selection goes outside the reason for that is some of this is partially selected same with some of the areas outside of the selection boundary some of those are partially selected so what we'll do is click on the background removed layer mask and click and drag the white color inside the selection area and release and now i'll hit ctrl shift a to deselect that and if i hide the original layer you'll see now the background is removed and it's kept in some of the details of the hair and now we just need to do this portion here as well so let's bring back the original layer click on that and with the foreground select tool i'll hold ctrl and zoom in and we're just going to loosely select this once again we're going to paint this hold ctrl zoom in paint this area here and hit the enter key hold ctrl zoom out and i'll hit the enter key again and once again we'll click on the layer mask and just click and drag the white color into the selection area ctrl shift a to deselect that and now we'll hide the original and there you can see our background has been removed so you can still refine this since it is a layer mask so right now you can see we've got a bunch of details from the hair here but that could maybe be too much for some of you guys you can also turn off the feathering that i had turned on with the foreground select tool so here i am in the tool feather edges is turned on for me you can either turn this down and let me just reset that so i can either turn this down using the up or down arrows or just turn it off entirely or you can grab the paintbrush tool and let me just reset this back to the defaults and with black as your color and let's say we turn the hardness down you can always come in here and paint out any areas maybe you don't want to keep and that's just one example of what you can do alright so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did don't forget to like this video subscribe to my channel and click the bell icon to be notified each time i have a brand new tutorial you can check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video but thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 6,796

Rating: 4.9409595 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2021

Id: -BvRuW7wR2Y

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 02 2021