Gimp Foreground Selection Tool

so the next step that we're going to be using is we're going to be using the foreground selection tool so when you've got this opened up here um first thing you want to do is you're going to want to make a copy of your layer here so i've already done that remember to do that you can just do a right click and you can go to duplicate layer um the other thing that you're going to want to do is before we get started you're going to want to make sure that you've got an alpha channel on your selection here so that's so so that we can select our background color or our background and delete that so that you see transparent pixels so make sure that you have add alpha channel selected here um if not you can click on your layer and you go to do a right click and go to add alpha channel so the tools we're going to be using today is we're going to be using the foreground selection tool and the foreground selection tool works by um you kind of telling it what's in the foreground and what's in the background and then it will kind of automatically set that up for you so that you can delete the background here so a few different presets here so um you're going to click on that so that's the foreground selection tool right here my i'm at 50 here for my zoom um the mode here we're going to keep a lot of these at our default modes for this um so the mode is going to be uh make sure that this is that uh replace crit we're going to do feather edges i'm going to make sure that i got my feather edges i'm going to bring this down just like a little bit remember that when you feather edges what that's going to do is it's going to soften your selection so you're going to change this depending on what it is that you're selecting so if you're selecting something where there's a nice hard clean edge you're going to want to turn feathering edges off we're selecting something like this dog here where there's going to be kind of softer edges so i'm going to keep that feathering here my draw mode is going to be on draw foreground my stroke width we're not going to worry about that here on my preview mode we're going to keep this a color here this selection tool here is the mask color you can change the color of your mask depending on what kind of image you're using default it's just blue so we're going to keep that a blue for the engine engine here we're on two different engines here so there's kind of two different ways you can use the foreground selection tool one is matting global and the other is matting 11. i've been kind of having trouble with matting 11. we're going to try to go ahead and just see if it works here otherwise we can use mating global if i run into the same problems that i've been having with matting 11 then we'll switch over here to mounting global um what that is there's kind of two different presets here for for using that tool one was designed by someone named levin and the other one was designed by different person they called it global instead so we're going to keep this on 11 here i've been having better results with 11. um there's levels here we're just going to keep this at our default here so the first thing we're going to do with our foreground selection tool is you'll notice that when you kind of hover your arm over your image here you have the lasso tool so what we're going to do is we're going to kind of tell it where our background um starts and stops so i'm going to click and drag and i'm holding my mouse button down and what i'm going to do is i'm going to really roughly sort of just go around um the outline of my image here i'm not going over my image of my dog i'm just kind of going around on the outside of it there's kind of like some small things that we're not really going to worry about so like some of these little whiskers here if it kind of loses some of those they're so fine we're not going to be super worried about that so i'm going to go all the way around i'm holding my mouse button down and then i'm going to go all the way around and end up where i started so you see this yellow dot appears that means that i've ended where i started so i'm going to press enter and you're going to see this mask up here so this is the blue mask here's the edge of our background now we're going to kind of fine tune this a little bit so you'll see that my tool is switched and it's more of a brush tool so remember with our bracket keys we can make this brush bigger or smaller so if i use my right bracket key i can make my brush bigger if i use my left bracket key i can make my brush smaller so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to kind of fine tune this i'm going to zoom in a little bit so i'm going to go to do yeah that's pretty good so i'm going to kind of fine tune this a little bit so i'm going to go and i'm just going to go along the edge here of my um dog here and again i'm not going over the edge of my dog i'm just kind of staying in on the inside of my perimeter here i'm going to go in and paint with this and i'm just kind of taking my time making sure that i get this all selected here i'm clicking and dragging you don't have to do this all in one go like i'm doing i'm just going to kind of go around the dock here all in one go you'll see that this once i deselect you'll see it'll show me what it is that i have that i've selected here so i'm going to kind of go around like that let me go around like that then once i let go you'll see that it'll show you show me what i've selected here i'm going to bring my brush down a little bit make it a little bit smaller so i can get into some of these finer details here a little bit bigger right there get this part of the ear so kind of the better job that you do with kind of better results that you get you don't have to be absolutely perfect i mean the purpose of this tool is to kind of save time on selecting your foreground so it doesn't have to be absolutely perfect i'm going to make this a little bit bigger select that kind of go around get that little part right there um the more you use this tool you'll see that you don't have to select like doing as exacting of a job that i'm doing um but i kind of like just i'm kind of superstitious here so i'm just gonna like do that if i click on my preview button it's gonna show me what my preview looks like so if i click on that it's gonna show me what that looks like that looks pretty good if i wanted to change some of this um i could what i can do if i want to add or um delete from my selection here i can do that so i can go to mode and i can add my add to my current selection or i can delete to my selection here so if i want to add it you can see there's a little part on the um underneath here that got kind of messed up here so i'm going to bring my brush down a little bit see if i kind of fix that part there whoops that wasn't quite right i'm actually just kind of gonna leave that so i'm gonna step back first i'm gonna press ctrl z so i'm gonna press select here okay so this is the problem that i've been having um normally if uh if this happens i'm not really sure what's going on i'm going to kind of switch over here i'm going to get a matting global some kind of glitch here i've kind of researched it i can't really figure out what's going on i'm at some sort of glitch with um with here so if you have the same problem then i'm going to switch and go to mating global here so i'm going to go up to select and go to select none and that's going to get rid of my selection get rid of these marching ants and then i'm just going to go through the same process again so i'm going to zoom out again here real quick so the same thing i'm just going to kind of click and drag and go around the outside of this here select that so it's some sort of glitch with the foreground selection tool and i've tried researching it there there's like some little things you can kind of mess with it's funny because i wasn't having this problem earlier but now also i'm having this problem now that i'm trying to make this video which is usually how it goes i'm gonna click and drag go all the way around press enter grab my brush i'm gonna bring my brush up a little bit i'm going to go a little bit faster now go ahead and paint around here like that you'll notice some different results with them between the matting global and the matting 11. i personally it seems like the matting 11 works a little bit better than the matting global um but they both work similarly so we can kind of fine-tune a little bit bring this down a little bit get this tongue like that get the end of this nose and snout here get his ear do that bring my brush up a little bit more here select that paint this in whoop you got a little overzealous that'll probably be okay going and painting like there i'm just going to get this last little bar bit right there like that do that and click on this preview here that looks pretty good i could go in and kind of fix this a little bit i'm just going to for this purpose though i'm just going to go in press select now what i can do is i want to make sure that i've got an alpha channel remember if you don't have this alpha channel selected you're not going to be able to delete the background now what i'm going to do is i'm going to go up here and go to um select and i'm going to invert this so right now what i what i have selected is i've got my dog selected so i'm going to invert this so what i'm going to do is i'm going to flip that so i'm going to go to select and then go to invert you're not really going to see much of a change but now what happens if i press the delete key i can delete that i'm going to go to select so now i've got this selected if i try to now what i want to do is kind of go in with my eraser tool um here and grab this and now if i try to select this part i'm not going to be able to select that because i've got this part selected so i can't really delete these parts that are kind of messed up here so what i want to do is i want to go back to select and then go to none so i can get rid of these marching ants because right now my background is selected and what i want to do is i'm going to zoom in again and i just kind of want to clean up oops see this is kind of frustrating because now i've got this problem and um i'm having these parts that are not working so now i'm just going to kind of go in and just kind of select these parts and sort of clean these up a little bit like that and sort of delete these here like that i'm going to kind of go around and clean this up a little bit and fix these parts on my dog until it goes so usually it works a lot better than this but again i'm having trouble with the program here it's kind of selecting those so i can kind of fix those areas up there like that so here you can kind of see what i was talking about with the feathering where you kind of have a soft edge so see on my selection here you got kind of a softer edge here that's because i've got that feathering enabled so it's selecting those um it's kind of softening those edge there okay so i'll just quit there what you want to do is you want to make sure that you have this nice and selected now the last thing you want to do is you want to make sure that you've got a new layer here so i'm going to go to duplicate layer or sorry i'm going to create a new layer i'm going to go to edit and go to fill actually i'm going to select a color first i'm just going to do kind of like this red here i'm going to go up to edit and then go to fill remember fg stands a foreground color bg stands for background color and do foreground color then you can kind of see how everything looks here like that okay

Channel: James Meara

Views: 3,053

Rating: 4.6078429 out of 5

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Id: ezSIxpExIBs

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 01 2021