GIMP Tutorial: Crop Hair and Fine Details

[Music] this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can crop fine objects like hair using so I'll go ahead and get started here with this image with this example image if you'd like to follow along with this tutorial I'll put a link to this image in the description of the video and in order for this method to work you're gonna have to use an image that has a lighter background than the subject it doesn't have to be white but the background should be lighter than the subject you're trying to crop out otherwise this method really won't work you'll have to try a more manual approach so in order to do this the first thing I'm going to do is create a duplicate of this layer click on the layer right there just click the button that says create a duplicate of the layer I'm going to turn off the visibility of the one on the bottom and then I'll create one more duplicate of that and what I want to do now is I want to create some I want to create some more separation between the the the subject in the background and I'm gonna do that by stripping everything down to black and white so I'm gonna go to colors and desaturate but first what I want to do is I want to bring out the colors in the subject a little more just so we can get a little extra separation when we go to do that so I'm gonna go to colors hue/saturation and I'm gonna bring the saturation all the way up go ahead and click OK and that what I want to do is I just want to make sure that the background is indeed white you probably can't see it on your screen but on the bottom of this image this is not all the way white it's white up top and then it is kind of like a light gray at the bottom here sort of like a gradient so I want to make sure the background is entirely white so I'm gonna go to colors levels and if you click this this little dropper icon right here you hover over it it says pick white point click on that and then whatever you click on on the image is gonna make white so I'm gonna come over here towards the darkest gray down here and click that and that's gonna make sure that that all turns white that that becomes the white point of the image it's kind of like a white balance I'll go ahead and click OK to finalize that and then I'll go to colors I want you want to go to saturate one more time want to bring that up a little more see if that helps yeah that that helps a little bit go ahead and click OK and now what we can do is go to colors and desaturate and its gonna make everything black and white or grayscale rather go ahead and click OK to apply that and then what I want to do is go to colors and levels and if you take this this midpoint right here and bring it over to the right you'll notice that the subject starts to turn black which is the that's the effect we're going for we want the entire subject to fill in black sort of like a silhouette I'll bring that over a little more we don't want it to go too much to the point where it's completely black and white we want to remain we want to keep some of the grayscale element in there so that when we crop it out it's a nice smooth transition going around the strands of hair here and it's not so like harsh and abrupt if you were to do like a threshold so I'm gonna go with something like that right there it looks pretty good I'll go ahead and click OK I then what I want to do is go to edit copy visible and I want to turn off the visibility of that layer and click on this middle layer right here then I'll right click on that and go to add layer mask and I'm gonna choose white full opacity go ahead and click add and then I'll go to edit paste and then I'll go to colours invert and then I want to take this it's now a floating selection I just wanna click on this little anchor icon down here anchor the floating layer and if you zoom in on this I'm gonna hold ctrl and roll up the mouse wheel to zoom in if you zoom in you can see we've cropped out a lot of it but we still have some more to fix I like if you notice here there's some like this some like a white glow going around the outside of the hair and there's some transparency going on the white our areas of like inside the hand like on the wrist right here and on the nose and a little bit on the eyes the room we'll fix that later that's very easy to fix what I want to focus on right now is the white glow around the hair and in order to fix that I'll go to colors and curves and down here at this bottom left note if I take it and bring that to the right it's going to add more black to the image which is to help reduce some of that glow but let me just cancel that for now one thing I would advise doing before you do that just so you can get a better view of what you're looking at I'm gonna create a new layer where it says right here create a new layer click on that choose transparency click OK and for the foreground color I'm gonna change this to green I want to put this go ahead and click OK and then go to edit fill with foreground color now we could take this green layer and put it beneath that layer because I want to put this on a green background just so I can see better like what is shining through like if you notice here there's a lot of green showing through that's gonna be really helpful to see that as when we go to fill that in and you could always toggle the visibility off and on so I'm gonna toggle it off then I'm gonna click back on this layer when you click on this layer make sure you click on this black and white box you have that selected you don't want this selected we want the black and white box selected and then we'll go to colors curves and then I'll try this again I'll move this over to the right that right there I think looks pretty good if you want you could play around with it a little bit and add some more white to the image every every image is different really I think this looks good as it is I'm gonna leave that as it is so with this particular image this this setting works pretty well I'll go ahead and click OK now let me turn on the visibility of that green layer and if you notice we have a lot of green showing through so there's a lot of transparency showing through where there shouldn't be and by the way to move the page I'm just pressing down the mouse wheel and moving the mouse so what I want to do to get rid of this is I want to grab the brush over here a paintbrush I want to flip the foreground and background colors around so we have white as the foreground and I'm gonna choose a soft brush over here adjust the size to however you'd like right here I'm gonna go with the size like 32 and just go ahead and start coloring that in with the white and it's gonna fill it in with the original image and if you just go around you can just fill in these green areas if you notice here some is showing through on the wrist and it's it's really hard to see this if it's just on the checkerboard background which is why I put that green background in there it really helps to help you visualize to see where it's shining through and again I'll go up here to the hair I'll fill that in a little more I'm not gonna get too close to the edges because we don't want to fill it back in so like the white background is showing through so I'm gonna only gonna fill it in going pretty close but not not too close like that right there you can see some white showing through that's went a little too far with that one and to undo that I just hit ctrl Z I didn't fill this in and if you're not sure how far you should go with filling it in what you can do is you could turn off the visibility of the green layer and turn on the visibility of the original layer you just talked all that off and on like so like if you feel tempted to fill this in right here that shouldn't be filled in because that's actual white space and that that's supposed to be negative space so let me fill this in let me just toggle that okay so if you notice right here this area should be filled in as well if you toggle off the visibility so I'm gonna go ahead and color that in let me turn the green layer back on I think I pretty much have a good reference at this point gonna color in the green areas do the same thing over here and it can be really it can be a little tricky to differentiate between what is part of the white background and what is actually just like a highlight on the hair from like the lighting from the wherever the picture was taken like if you notice here this white area that's it looks like it's supposed to be the background or something but it's really just highlights on the hair so that's why I recommend toggling this off and on go ahead and fill that in and if you notice here I'm gonna zoom in so I'm gonna zoom in on the shoulder here part of this got cut off as well so you can go ahead and just paint that in same thing over here a little bit of this got cut off and what you could do now is you could turn off the visibility of that layer and you can see we've cropped out our subject and all of the fine details around the hair as you see so that's how you can do that with if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 83,959

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp crop hair, crop hair and fine details, nick saporito, logos by nick, logosbynick, logos by nick inkscape

Id: cQZR0yeDMQU

Length: 8min 55sec (535 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2018