Gimp Layer Mask Tutorial How to Remove and Replace a Background

hi I'm Adam Valentine with twin star Mediacom and in this video I'm going to show you how to use to put two photos together using a layer mask now here's one of the reasons why I needed to use this technique for myself I was on vacation last summer and I took several photos that all had a similar issue I would shoot a landscape and either the land looked good but the sky was washed out and overexposed or the sky looks good but the land was too dark now I'm sure if you're a skilled photographer and you have the right equipment you can adjust your aperture or ISO settings or whatever you need to do to capture a great image well I'm not a professional photographer and while I was on vacation I didn't have the time or the inclination to mess with all of the settings on my camera to get that perfect shot I could simply point my camera a little more toward the ground and the camera would adjust automatically so that the ground looked good and I could take another shot with the camera pointed a little more toward the sky and then the sky would look great then I could put the two images together when I got home using and layer masks okay so here's how we're gonna do this I've got opened up and I have my two images and this one is going to be my primary image this one the color and the foreground looks great and you can see the rocks are not quite as dark but in this one the sky looks really nice so ultimately I'm going to put the sky from this image over into this image but this is going to be my primary image the one I'm gonna start working with so to open this up in I can just left click and hold the left mouse button down and drag my picture into and I can zoom in a little bit if I want to and now I need to create a layer mask but before I do that I'm going to right click on this layer and add an alpha channel that allows you to have a transparency in your image so if I delete something it will be transparent where if you didn't have an alpha Channel and you eat something it will just be a white or whatever your background color is so now that I've got an alpha channel on here I'm also going to go ahead and duplicate this layer and you can do that by clicking on this little icon right here now we're going to take this top layer and we're going to convert it to black and white so you can come over to colors and then go down to desaturate then you have these different options lightness luminosity or an average of the two and you want to select the one that gives you the best contrast so I think I'll just go with lightness and I'll click OK and this is a nice black-and-white image but when I say black and white regarding a layer mask I mean only black and white no shades of grey so we're gonna come up to colors and then go to the curves tool and as you move these around you'll see the blacks getting blacker if you move this around you see the whites getting whiter and what I want to do is just make it so the sky is completely white but I also want to keep as much of this outline as possible of the rocks and the trees so you can just play with these settings a little bit if I go too much you see things I start losing detail and the trees there so I don't want to go too much and I want to increase my blacks so there's no detail visible in the rocks I'll zoom in so you can see I don't want shades of grain here I want that to be completely black okay I'm pretty satisfied with the way that looks now so I can go ahead and click okay but I also want to paint black over this I'm going to go to my paintbrush tool and I'm going to make a nice big brush and I'm just going to remove any white spots here so with the layer mask anything that's white will show through and anything that's black will be removed and if you remember I want to remove this guy so I can replace it with the sky in this image so I'm going to have to switch these this top part wat to be black and this will have to be white so to do that we'll go to colors and then we'll come down to invert now we're going to go to our lower layer we'll select that then we'll right-click and we'll come down to add layer mask and then these options come up and we'll just leave it where it says white full opacity and we'll click Add now when you're working on a layer mask you can either work on the image itself or work on the layer mask if you're on the image it has this white border around it so if you see a black border around the layer mask then you're not working on it you want to make sure that this has a black border on it and this one it has a white border but you can't really see it so you want to make sure your layer mask is selected then you want to come back to this black and white image and we're going to cut this out and paste it into our layer mask so you can go over to edit and cut or you can use a keyboard shortcut control X which I normally prefer to use keyboard shortcuts so with this layer selected I'm going to hit ctrl X that deletes it but it also copied it to the clipboard now make sure I'm in my layer mask and I'll hit ctrl V to paste that pastes in as a floating layer now to make this part of the layer mask you have to hit this little anchor tool and now we've got our layer mask so as you can see we have now our foreground and just a transparency where the sky is supposed to be so now we need to bring in our image that has the sky so I'll just left-click and hold and we'll drag it in and that opens up has another layer it put the layer on top so we can just select that layer and then use these arrow keys to arrow down so that layers underneath and it already looks pretty good just the way it is but if you wanted to you could use your move tool and move things around to get the sky how you want it but honestly I was pretty happy with it the way it looked when I first pasted it in so to make things look a little better you can come up to this layer again and make sure you're selecting your layer mask and then we can paint over and get rid of some of this stuff now if you remember anything you paint black will become a transparency and this layer behind it will show through so I'll take my paintbrush with black selected and I can just paint right over this and it basically just removes that so that the layer underneath shows through and I could go ahead and get rid of this outline around the top of the rocks as well and there's a little bit of a white line around some of these trees I don't want to destroy the whole thing if I erase too much you can see the tree just kind of goes away so I've got a soft brush with a fuzzy edge but it's still a little too harsh but I can take the opacity down on the paintbrush and then it's kind of in-between showing a little bit of the top layer and a little bit of the bottom layer at the same time so it will make the appearance of the line around these things look a little less of course he can spend as much time as you want on this to try to make it as perfect as possible but if we zoom out I mean the picture looks pretty good the way it is now you're not gonna see any of that stuff unless you're really zoomed in so you could play with it more and get it to be perfect but I think it looks pretty good if I was to use this picture in a video that I was making it would be hard to tell that I pasted one image on top of another here's what the original image looked like it was the foreground looked nice but the sky was kind of washed out and we had a picture with a sky looked nice but the foreground and the trees and rocks and all that was too dark now we've got this image where the ground looks great the sky looks great and everything looks nice

Channel: Twin-Star-Media

Views: 15,340

Keywords: gimp, layer mask, image manipulation, remove background, tutorial, photo manipulation, photo editing, gimp 2.8

Id: oyGCRXDmcTw

Length: 10min 44sec (644 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2016