Fix Your BACKGROUND for Cleaner Shots | Photoshop Tutorial Lightroom

hi guys my name's Brock blight I make videos mostly about wildlife photography and in this video I'm going to be showing you how to clean up a background on an image that has potential but the conditions weren't quite perfect but I'll show you what I mean in a sec I'm working with the raw file in this case I'm using Lightroom and Photoshop and Windows 10 so if you're on a Mac you can follow along I think the only difference is that some of the shortcuts might be different so let's jump into Lightroom here and I'll show you the picture and we can get started alright so here we are this is a shot of a wild Kestrel that I took in Richmond Park here in the UK you can see it's a pretty nice shot and if i zoom in on the Kestrel you can see it's nice and sharp we've got really nice detail on the eye and on the feathers and for me the biggest problem with this image is really the background it's usually bad tough these big areas of sky behind your subject so in this case I was kind of sidestepping and trying to get this tree that was off in the distance behind my subject as much as possible but there are still a few patches where the sky isn't quite completely blotted out so I'm gonna be showing you how to fix those so let's get into it so the first thing we're going to do is reset just to make sure we're back to the base image and then I'm gonna scroll down here I'm gonna turn sharpening down to zero I'm going to turn my color noise reduction down to 10 it's just the value that I like to use and I'm going to turn chromatic aberration correction and profile Corrections on and what this does is basically gives us a nice flat base image don't worry after we've done our editing we can come back in into Lightroom and we can re-enable sharpening and the vignettes and things like that if we want so then we're gonna right click and edit in Photoshop CC okay so here's our image in Photoshop so the first step is we're just going to take this background layer and duplicate it by dragging it down to the new layer icon and then I'm going to double click to rename this layer foreground and then I'm gonna press L to select the lasso tool now there are a few different types of lasso tools so just go in and make sure you have the polygonal one selected that's the one I prefer to use for this kind of thing and then we're basically just going to outline our foreground elements so in this case that's the kestrel itself and also this tree stump that it's sitting on so I'm gonna start from this bottom corner don't have to be very precise just sort of quickly go around and try and leave a small border we don't want to actually clip into the kestrel at all but just try and get rid of as much that background as possible that's going to make the next steps a little bit easier but we don't have to be super accurate let's just keep going come down to this bottom corner just to make sure everything's selected and then link back to the start point and there we go and now that we've got that selected we're going to turn it into a layer mask by clicking this layer mask button down here at the bottom right boom and we don't need this layer at the moment we're going to use it later so for now we can just hide it and then we're going to come back down to this background layer and now is the point where we're actually going to fix our background essentially the whole point of this step is we're going to give ourselves a completely clean background with all the foreground elements removed and then we're going to add our foreground back in on top so the way that works is we're going to select the Kestrel and tree-stump now we've already made a selection mask so we can actually reselect that really easily just by coming over to this selection mask layer here and holding down ctrl and clicking on it and you can see that gives us our selection back and now we're going to select all of the areas of sky that we want to remove so to do that I'm just going to hold down shift and you can see it gives you this little plus icon on the lasso tool and now we're just going to go around the edges of these white areas of sky same kind of things before you don't have to be super accurate but just make sure that you don't actually go into inside the sky like this you want to make sure that you're always outside and it's okay if you leave a little space to the beginning now that one's done we're just going to do these others so hold down shift again that gives you the plus icon that's going to add to our selection and then once you click the first time you can let go and then just keep going around all right and now that everything is selected we're going to go to edit content the wear fill and then just click OK and this might take a few seconds so we'll just give us some time to do this and there we go no sky showing no foreground elements we're just going to hit ctrl D to deselect and then we're going to unhide our foreground layer and you can see this already looks pretty good we've basically got a completely clean background there is one problem down here where there was a bit of sky intersecting this tree stump so I'll show you how to fix that real quick we're just going to zoom in and select the layer mask on your foreground layer and select a brush I'm using this soft brush it's by the way it's the square brackets to increase or decrease the size we're gonna paint in black so let's just come in and start painting in this area I'm just going to do this quickly but obviously on your own time you can spend as long as you want and be really careful now the great thing here about using layer masks is say you accidentally went a bit too far and you just cut off a piece like that you can just press X to select the white color and then this will actually add what you've painted away back in so whenever possible use layer masks they're great because they preserve everything that's there they just make it transparent so there's our image with a fixed background all we have to do now is press ctrl s to save and then we'll come back into Lightroom and you can see it's already gone to our saved version and then now we're back in Lightroom we can do the rest of our final editing we can add sharpening back in we can add a vignette back in we can do our crop and here's the final image here's the before and after guys thank you so much for watching I hope you found this useful please like this video subscribe if you want to see more and don't forget to check out some of my other videos I actually go out into the field and do wildlife photography in a sort of vlog style so I'm taking you guys along with me and showing you techniques and things like that I think you'll find them quite entertaining if you have any other tips for fixing backgrounds let me know down in the comments and I will see you in the next video bye you

Channel: Rob Blight

Views: 35,468

Keywords: wildlife photography, editing, post processing, photoshop, lightroom, background, clean background, fix background, fix, composition, bokeh, smooth, rob blight, tutorial, kestrel, wildlife, bird of prey, pc, windows, windows 10, adobe, backgrounds, clean, nikon, d850, 500pf, 500mm pf

Id: bovsNIRG86g

Length: 8min 53sec (533 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 06 2019