GIMP 2.10 Basics: Using the Foreground Select Tool

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'm gonna show you guys how to use the foreground select tool and this is using 2.10 point 6 at the time of this tutorial this is the latest version of and this tool essentially makes it super easy to distinguish foreground objects from background objects in your image using a very limited number of steps but of course before we get into that I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies media design.com as always we have tons of video and text tutorials on here as well as project translate you can watch one of our playlists support us on patreon and of course see our poll of the week results so definitely check those items out and you can enroll in our best-selling photo editing from beginner to pro photo retouch your course and I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so for today's tutorial I'm going to be using a free image from pixabay right here and then another image I took of my dog here and I'm just going to show you a couple examples of how this tool works so for starters you can come over here to your toolbox and here you'll see the foreground select tool and so all the tool options for the foreground select tool will show up down here in the tool options section and as always with all of these select tools you've got four different modes here you've got replace the current selection add to the current selection subtract from the current selection and intersect with the current selection we're gonna stick with add to the current selection then you've got an option here to feather the edges and this is going to determine whether or not the edges of this foreground select tool are going to have a hard edge or going to have a softer edge that sort of fades from one part which is the foreground to the background I actually recommend keeping the feathered edges option checked because this tool isn't perfect and sometimes it does leave kind of jagged rough edges around your foreground object the radius of the feathered edges is going to depend on how large your images this image is decently large so we can keep it around 10 if you're using a smaller image you can decrease this to something around like five or even something lower than five but I'll just stick with ten and for the most part these other items are going to come into play when we actually start drawing with this tool but you'll see down here there's something called engine and this is just going to determine the basically the sampling method that's going to be used for the actual matting matting being the technical term for separating a background object from a foreground object so that's just called image matting and these are both different types of algorithms that were developed by different groups so this group here the madding Levin group was led by somebody named Levin that's where the name comes from and then this group here just decided to name their method the global matting sampling method so that's why this is called Madden global and both of these use different methods so the Madden global option uses iterations so that's really just as far as I know how many times the algorithm is run in order to separate the background object from the foreground and then with matting Levin you've got levels in active levels and that also just allows you to make adjustments to the way the algorithm is basically being applied to separate the two objects the background object and the foreground object so I'm gonna stick with madding Levin as my engine and you'll see that my mouse pointer looks like the same mouse pointer as the lasso tool and I'll show you what I mean so if I click on my lasso tool you can see that has the same exact mouse pointer so I'll come back here to my foreground select tool and the reason for this you could actually see it down here it says roughly outline the object to extract and the lasso tool is a way to sort of freehand outline anything in and so basically what this tool wants you to do is use the lasso tool first to roughly outline what your foreground object is so in this case we're going to just roughly outline the girl here and we shouldn't have to precisely outline her because that would sort of defeat the purpose of the tool and the purpose of this tool if I haven't said it already is to basically separate the foreground object from the background object with minimal human input and so you just want to make sure you connect these two items at the end or make sure you connect basically your points at the end so you have a closed loop here if you don't it'll still work but just try to connect the loop here and then hit the enter key and so what that does now is it roughly distinguishes your background from your foreground so out here in the blue area you can see your background and then in this area which is sort of just a blue tinted area is your foreground and this is obviously a very jagged very rough outline right now but now you'll see your mouse pointer has also switched over to the paintbrush tool and what this is going to allow you to do is paint and it's going to show up as your foreground color first but then it's going to show up as clear once you release your mouse pointer but you're basically painting what your foreground object is and you can adjust the stroke width over here if you want your stroke to be larger or you could keep it sort of smaller which is what I recommend so I'll keep it at 26 for now and I'm just going to roughly tell this algorithm that this is my foreground object and I'm just gonna start with the larger parts of my foreground so the more you know the main parts of the image here or of my model I should say so her body and her hair the larger parts of her hair and then you'll see that when I release instead of being my foreground color which was the sort of brownish color now it's this clear color but I haven't really gotten any of the fibers of her hair or anything so what I'm gonna do is just turn down my stroke width and now with a thinner brush I'm just going to sort of mark off her hair and I can use a smaller brush if I wanted to and that would probably create a more accurate result but just for this tutorial I'm gonna roughly do this and just make sure we get some of these parts right here a little bit better and then I'll release my mouse if you screw up at any point you can change this to the draw background mode let's say you select too much of the background like that I can switch over to draw a background and then just paint on that and that'll switch that over to my background I don't recommend doing that too often because it does kind of screw up the algorithm when you do that so switch back over to draw foreground and make sure this part of the hair here is painted out and once you're ready go ahead and hit the enter key and the algorithm is going to work to distinguish the foreground object from the background object so you can see here these parts here got missed so what I can do is switch to draw background and just select these parts as my background and now it'll live update that algorithm and you'll see it kind of improved that right there and this is why I don't recommend you know on that in that case I purposely selected too much of the foreground and kind of screwed up that part right there but now it's all fixed and you can do that sort of throughout the image if you want if you want a more accurate sort of distinguishment between the foreground and background object and once you're happy with this you can see down here it says select foreground and then press escape to exit the preview or enter to apply so if I didn't want to keep this and I wanted to start over I can hit the exit key otherwise just hit enter and now we've got our foreground object selected here and there's a couple of things I can do once I have my foreground object selected I can erase the background or I can change the background to a different color or I can erase the foreground object or really just do a variety of things here I can only make image adjustments to this foreground object but let me come over here right-click on this main image layer and make sure I have an alpha channel added on here if this is not grayed out like it is right here make sure you click on that to add transparency to your image and then I'll hit ctrl I and that allows me to select my background instead of the foreground and then if I hit the Delete key you'll see that my background is now deleted and I'll hit control shift a to deselect everything and now you can see this algorithm did a pretty good job of selecting our foreground object from the background and I'll hit control Z to back up a little bit and I'll show you another example of what I can do so I'll come over here to colors and then saturation and I could turn the saturation down of just my background and that allows the foreground object to stand out a little bit better so I'll click OK so now we have a black and white background and a color foreground object and I'll hit ctrl Z to undo that and the last thing I could do is I can create a new layer and I'll just name this overlay and click OK and I can grab the gradient tool here and just select a random pre-selected gradient here so I just went with this abstract one gradient and then I can click and drag this gradient and that'll draw a gradient only on the background part of my image and I'll hit enter and then I could change the layer mode of this so I can come up here and let's say I put this to soft light and now it just looks like we have a sort of rainbow color going on in the background and it doesn't affect the foreground object which is the girl in the foreground here so go to control shift a to deselect everything so there's our first example and that was using the matting levan option alright so for my next example I'm going to come over here to the photo of the dog and I'm going to grab the foreground select tool again and you'll see that the lasso tool is my mouse pointer once again and so we're just going to loosely trace the dog as the foreground object and connect that for a closed loop and hit the enter key and I can change my preview color here so right now it's set to blue but I can have this too green or red and I'll just stick with red for now you can also do grey and now you'll see my mouse pointer has changed to my brush tool again so I'll use this to tell the algorithm what my foreground object is and we don't have to be exact but the better job we do the better the final product will look and I can also come over here and increase the stroke width this way I can cover a little bit more ground a little bit more quickly and now I'll hit the enter key and that will separate my foreground object from my background and something I can do that I didn't show you in the last example is I can change the engine that we're using so right now it's set to madding Levin I could change this to Matt in global and you guys can see the difference so this algorithm obviously has not worked nearly as well I'll turn the iterations down I'm not sure why it missed this giant chunk right here but it certainly did not do as good of a job I can use my paintbrush here to try to paint this out and there must have been some sort of glitch here but I'll just switch it back over to madding Levin and now you can see that this algorithm has done a little bit of a better job and I can also increase the number of levels here which is going to increase the number of down sampled levels to use that's just going to sort of adjust your algorithm if maybe you didn't get quite the result you wanted same with the active levels you can adjust those I'm going to keep these where they're at though just for this example because I like the way it looks right now and once you're ready make sure you're clicked on the actual image and then just hit the enter key and that will select your foreground object in this case we do have the feathered edges so it's going to sort of miss some of this stuff up here and that's alright and I'll just hit ctrl I to once again select the invert of this and I want to add a transparency to this image so I'll right click on here and go to add alpha Channel and now when I hit the Delete key you'll see that everything is deleted and again because we have the feathered edges here it didn't delete a lot of this stuff right here but that's alright just for this example and I'll hit ctrl Z I can also do to this image what I did with the last one so I can go to colors saturation and I can only adjust the saturation of the background there and that helps our foreground objects stand out just by desaturating that background or I could do something like add a layer mask based on this election so I could right click go to add layer mask and under initialize layer mask to make sure selection is checked and click add in this case it's going to mask out the dog because remember we did invert that selection if I hit ctrl Z and then ctrl I to invert that selection back to where it originally was I can right click add layer mask make sure selection is checked again and that'll mask out the background I'll hit ctrl Z and then ctrl shift a to select none so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you guys liked it if you did please subscribe to our youtube channel at youtube.com slash Davies media design you can also visit our website at Davies media design.com and you can enroll in our best-selling photo editing course from beginner to pro photo retoucher and include a link to that as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time you

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 131,538

Rating: 4.9223762 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, gimp graphic design, gimp photo editing, gimp 2018, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, foreground select tool, GIMP 2.10.6, gimp basics, erase image background, erase complex images, selection tools, photoshop selection tools, matting levin, matting global, select subject

Id: uhRGix-x5Mg

Length: 13min 1sec (781 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 29 2018