How to Create Perfect Selections in Affinity Photo

have you ever tried to remove the background of a photo only to find that making a perfect selection can be really tricky to do well today I'm going to show you some powerful selection techniques that you can use to remove your backgrounds like a professional let's get started if you'd like to follow along with me I've left a download link to this photo in the video description now to get started with removing the background we first need to make a selection of this man and to do that we have a great tool for this the selection brush tool with the selection brush tool all you have to do is begin painting over the man an affinity photo will automatically select him so let's go ahead and get started with painting a rough selection on this man [Music] you with this photo it's really hard to select the shoes because the shoes and the background are very similar in color but don't worry I'm going to show you a technique that lets you select the shoes perfectly but to do this we need to make sure that the entire shoe is within our selection so I'm going to paint outside the edges of the shoe just to make sure that the entire shoe is in our selection [Music] so at this point you can now go through and tweak your selection to make it a little more exact and to do this you can make your brush size smaller by using the bracket keys and then you can get some of those smaller details in the selection also I'm going to start removing parts of the selection that we don't want included like this gray background between his legs to do that you can change the mode up in the context toolbar from add to subtract or if you want to do it an even faster way you can leave the mode set to add and while holding down alt or option you can click and drag to remove the selection now I'm going to speed up this part of me we're finding the selection a little bit so see you in a minute [Music] all right I've now finished the selection of our man and now we need to refine our selection to make it look even better so up in the context toolbar press refine now we can paint around the edges of his hair to tell affinity to take a second look at these edges to really get those details from the individual strands of his hair for this photo it's really tricky for affinity to tell where his hair is and where the background is and you can see that because wherever it's red that means it's not selected and we can see little bits of red on the edges off his hair and even right here so to add that back in we can change our adjustment brush mode from matte to foreground and now when we paint in this mode those parts of his hair will be added back into the selection alright with his hair refined we can now press apply now with our selection finished other than his shoes we're ready to apply a mask so let's press the mask icon now he's been removed from his background we can press command or control D to deselect and now it's time to work on those pesky shoes as I said before the color of his shoes and the color of the floor are so similar that it's very difficult to select them but we can make a perfect exact selection using the pen tool so press on the pen tool and before we start using it we need to make sure we have the right settings so let's make sure that we're using smart mode which will make it so that as we lay down points affinity photo will automatically add curves to our lines to make it look more smooth and natural and make sure that you also have rubber band mode turned on rubber band mode gives you a preview before you even lay down a point of how your line will look so with the pen tool we can begin tracing around to the outside of his shoes and this process might take a while so take your time with it just enjoy the process and remember that if at any time you put a point where you don't want it you can press command or control Z to undo I'm now going to speed up this part of the video so I'll see you when I'm done you to finish our tres we're now going to make points outside of the edges of the floor and then to close our curves we just need to press on the first point that we started with so now with our curve we can turn this into a selection up in the context toolbar so press on the word selection and now that we have a selection of our floor we can paint in black on our mask to remove the floor so let's select our mask in the layers panel then press E for a paint brush tool and now with our color set to black we can paint over the floor and because it's within our selection only the floor will be removed not his shoes I'm going to make my brush a little bit bigger by using the bracket keys and I'll keep on painting it away nice with the floor removed we can press command or control D to deselect and now it looks like we have pretty much a perfect selection of our man but if you zoom into the shoes because we use the pen tool this selection almost looks a little too perfect a little too perfect to be natural for our selection so to fix this I think I want to apply a blur just to the edges of his shoes to make it look more natural and how should we apply a blur well we can use a blur filter so let's go down to our filter icon and then go all the way to the top and press Gaussian blur with our Gaussian blur applied we can bring up the radius and start to blur the edges but ooh it looks like it's starting to blur the entire man we just want the blur to affect the edges of our mask so to do this we need to make the Gaussian blur layer a child layer to our mask so it's just on the edges of our mask but right now affinity has kind of a weird glitch in it if your mask is a child layer to your photo it doesn't want you to apply another child layer to your mask for some reason it just won't work so to fix this we're going to click and drag our mask layer to the top of the layer stack now we can click and drag on our Gaussian blur layer and make it a child layer to our mask by dragging it to the right so now you can see if we double click on our Gaussian blur we can adjust the radius and it's only being applied to the edges of our mask that's exactly what we wanted I'm going to make the blur about one pixel to give it more of a natural blur but not too much of a blur now the shoes are looking so good but we might not want this blur affecting the entire edges of the mask and let me show you why with this blur layer on the edges of the man's hair are kind of fuzzy looking we're losing a lot of the detail that was there when we didn't have to blur on so to fix this let's turn the blur layer back on and we are going to press command or ctrl I to invert this filter layer now the filter is being applied to nothing and if we paint in white we can apply the blur just the edges of our shoes exactly where we want the blur so get out the brush tool in my case I already have it out make sure your color is set to white and now we can paint around the edges of the shoe all right here's what our selection looked like before super perfect super sharp and here's what it looked like after a little more realistic I'm going to press command or control 0 to zoom all the way back out and now we can see before we selected our man and remove the background and here's our after with our perf selection of the man you know what rhymes with selections reflections if you want to learn how to make reflections in affinity photo be sure to check out this video to create this awesome beard effect thanks for watching my friends and I'll see you in the next affinity revolution tutorial

Channel: Affinity Revolution

Views: 233,415

Keywords: affinity photo, tutorial, selections, mask, masking, remove background, advanced, complex, refine, pen tool, cut out

Id: StH4Lg5EeWQ

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 17 2019