Hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by
Davies Media Design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'll be showing you how to
remove the backgrounds of your images. And this is actually going to be an alternative method - I
know there's a lot of methods out there already on how to do this. This is something that I
have found to be the quickest method but the most efficient method, and I think there's a lot
of methods out there that only work in certain cases. I think this method is going to work for a
lot of you in most cases. But of course before we get into that I want to direct you guys over to
my website at DaviesMediaDesign.com. As always we have tons of GIMP video and text tutorials on
here, so definitely check that out. You can also enroll in my GIMP 2.10 Masterclass: From Beginner
to Pro Photo Editing, which is a best-seller on Udemy, and you could support our channel and help
us grow by becoming a DMD Premium Member, and I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant
links from this tutorial in the description of the video. Alright so here is my final image that
we're gonna be working on. This is GIMP version 2.10.10 by the way. And here is the original
image - so as you can see, this image, you know, the lighting was pretty good but the background
had- we had this backdrop going on here, and then the backdrop just kind of ended based on the angle
that the photographer decided to take for this particular photo. So we have the backdrop and then
we've got part of this brick wall here as well, and so we need to erase those elements because
I think it looks a little bit sloppy. I mean you can make the case that it looks kind of artsy this
way but I think it just in the end looks a little bit sloppy. And so we're gonna cut out everything
around the subject here, and only have the color backdrop here or the color background. And you can
see right now I have a white background set up, but you can also have this as a light blue
background here, or you know whatever background color you want to use. I happen to use light blue,
and then also a dark blue here. So this method is going to use a combination of the Foreground
Select Tool, the Paths tool, and layer masks, and it sounds like a lot of work but trust me
it's gonna be pretty quick and pretty easy. So let's go ahead and dive in here. So I'll start
by opening up our original composition - so go to File> and you guys will go to Open but in my
case I'll go to Open Recent. And I'm going to choose this file right here - I'm gonna post the
link to this file in the description of the video, so definitely look for that. If I hold ctrl
and zoom out here we could see the full image, and this photo has a fairly simple background so I
know a lot of you out there look for tutorials on how to remove complex backgrounds. This technique
will work for complex backgrounds as well, so bear with me here. But we're gonna start by
adding a transparency layer to this. I'm gonna right click on our image layer, I'm gonna go to
"Add alpha channel," that's just going to ensure that there is a transparency layer behind this
image whenever we erase any part of it. Next I'm going to grab my Foreground Select Tool over here
from my toolbox, and you guys can copy my settings here - you'll see my radius is set to "3" for the
"feather edges" option - that's just going to make the edges of our selection area are a little bit
fuzzy so that they're not super hard edges. That's just gonna help things blend into one another
here. And by the way I have an entire tutorial dedicated to how to use the Foreground Select
Tool, so definitely check that out if you're not familiar with this tool. But again you can
copy all of my settings here, and I'm just going to start by outlining loosely the subject here.
And this is going to allow me to separate the foreground object, which is the model, from the
background. So I'll hit the enter key. And I'm going to increase the size of my brush using the
brackets on my keyboard. And I'm actually gonna come over here and change our foreground color
because that's going to be the color that shows up here as we paint our foreground object. So I'm
just going to choose this red color I have here and click OK. Also you want to make sure the
draw mode is set to "Draw foreground" here, so I'll click on that. And now I'm going to click and
drag my mouse to draw the foreground. So this is telling the algorithm that this is my foreground
object. When you release your mouse it should show up as the original picture below. If it shows up
as this blue color that means you just have to come over here and switch from draw background
to draw foreground. I am loosely drawing the foreground object, but I do want to make sure
that I get a decent amount of the details here so that the algorithm does a slightly better job
of selecting the foreground objects. Alright, so I've loosely selected the foreground object.
I'm gonna make sure that the engine here is set to "Matting Levin," and also copy my settings right
here. You guys can always play around with those settings if you don't get the final result you
want. But once you're ready hit the "enter" key, and you'll see the algorithm is going to attempt
to select the foreground object here. So it's done a pretty good job, there's just a couple
spots I gotta clean up real quick. I'll hold ctrl and zoom in. So you'll see there's some spots
right here - I'm going to decrease the size of my brush using the brackets on my keyboard and just
make sure that this stuff does not get selected. So hold ctrl and zoom out. It's okay if it's
not perfect. So we've got some parts right here, and these we could clean up in the next step as
well. So again don't worry too much about this selection area being perfect. So hold ctrl and
zoom out. I think that's gonna be good enough for now. So now I'm gonna hit the enter key, and
for those of you who have a complex background this part is going to be a little bit harder for
you because the foreground select tool probably didn't do as good of a job of selecting the
actual foreground object. So I'll show you how to clean that up here in a second. But what we're
gonna do is we're going to come over here to our paths dialog for the next step - if you don't see
your paths dialog you can go to Windows>Dockable Dialogs>Paths - and now I'll come over here and
choose my selection to path option here. So I'm going to click on that, and you'll see that
now our selection area that was drawn from the foreground select tool is over here in the shape
of a path. So I can unhide that path, and I'll hit ctrl+shift+a to deselect that selection area.
And now you'll see there is a path going along our subject. Before you get frustrated, if your path
is not as neatly around your subject as mine is, here's how we clean it up: we're going to come
over here and grab the path tool, and then we're going to click on this path here. So the reason
I like using this method is you could see how many nodes it takes to draw a path cleanly like
this. So the foreground select tool allows us to create a fairly clean selection area and then
draw a complex path from that pretty quickly. So hold ctrl and zoom in. So for this part you're
going to navigate around your image and you're gonna find any area that maybe deviates a little
bit too far from the subject that you're trying to outline here. So hold ctrl and zoom in - you
can see there's some parts right here that are a little bit off. If I hold ctrl and click and drag
on the node it's going to create a handle. I do have an entire tutorial dedicated to mastering
the paths tool, so if you're not familiar with that I recommend checking that out. And if I hold
ctrl and click on a line segment that'll create a brand new node. So basically what you're doing is
just going around this image here and you're going to adjust the path, hold ctrl and drag to add
some curves here. These are going to be handles that allow you to adjust the curves. So you're
just adjusting this until you get everything a little bit more tidied up and a little bit more to
your liking. Hold ctrl and zoom in - and I do want to add for those of you looking for that quick
fix, I mean there are some tutorials out there if your photo has a lot of contrast already but
for the most part there is no true quick fix to selecting complex shapes or selecting foreground
objects that are set against a complex background. There are plenty of techniques out there and a
lot of them work pretty well but none of them are going to be, you know, a super quick solution
to this problem of having a complex background. So there's just a lot less
work with this than having to sit here and draw the entire path from scratch Alright, I'll hold ctrl and zoom out. So I think
we're pretty good there - it's not perfect but I think it's going to do just fine for what we
need it for. So next we're going to turn this back into a selection area. So we've adjusted it
with the path tool, now we'll convert it back to a selection area. All you have to do is come over
here and click "Selection from path" while you're inside of your path tool, and that will once
again turn that area into a selection. And now I'm going to come back over here to our layers
panel. and so we have our original layer here, and you'll remember that we put an alpha channel
on this, so that added transparency. So now I'll right-click and go to "Add layer mask," and
under "Initialize layer mask to:" I'm going to choose "Selection" and click Add. And there
you'll see our background will disappear. But we don't know really how good the edges are going to
look after applying our layer mask so let's check that out. We're gonna change to a different tool -
so we'll use the Move tool. I'll hit ctrl+shift+a and that's going to "Select none," and then I'm
going to come over to my paths dialog and hide that path. So you can see there's a few spots
here that need some work, and if I hold ctrl and zoom in you can see right here for sure there are
some blue parts or some white parts here where you could see the original background. So if you want
to clean it up further you can come over here and click this icon to switch your foreground
and background colors to black and white, then grab your paintbrush tool, and you're going
to want to make sure you're on your actual layer mask here. So make sure you're on your layer mask,
hold ctrl and zoom in. So whenever you have black and you paint that on the layer mask it's going
to hide that object. And in this case I want to make sure I have a pretty good sized brush and
that the hardness is turned down. So you can see the hardness slider here - right now it's set to
about 50%. So by painting on this layer mask you can see it's allowing us to - and I'll hit ctrl+z
because I didn't do a good job there - but it's allowing us to refine this outline here and just
really do away with any parts that maybe showed up that we didn't want to show up. And again I'm
not going to spend too much time on this just to keep this tutorial a decent length for you guys
- a watchable length. But here you can see I'm getting rid of any parts here, and you guys can
do this with hair or just with any real artifact that's showing up. And you can also do the
opposite - so if I hit the "X" key on my keyboard, let's say I erase too much and I wanted to
bring it back, I can always paint it back in by painting white on the layer mask. But I'll hit
ctrl+z to undo that because I do want that gone. I'll hold ctrl and zoom out - there is a white
part right here and I actually left that in the original edit because it kind of looks like light
that's sort of shining off the hair. So I decided to just leave that in, so I'll hold ctrl and
zoom out. And now we have our model here with the background removed, or the subject here. So
now I'm going to add a new background behind it, and to do that I'll create a new layer. And I'm
going to name this one "White background" and click OK. And I'm going to click and drag this
below our original image layer here, and now I'm going to come over here and I'm going to change
this black color to more of an off-white color and click OK. So now we have white and off-white.
And now I'm going to grab my gradient tool here, and I have the shape set to "radial" and I have
the color here set to "foreground and background." You can go with HSB or RGB - it doesn't really
matter. And now I'm going to click and drag this, and you can always swap the colors if you
want. So I like the lighter white in the middle and radiating out to the darker white -
or the off-white. And you can also adjust the gradient here, so I'll go with that right there
and hit the enter key. I do like having a gradient background behind the subject because I feel
like it emulates a studio lighting environment where perhaps it's not entirely evenly lit. But
next I want it to appear as if the light hitting the subjects face is casting a shadow on our
backdrop that we created here. So in order to do that I'm going to come over here back to the
paths dialog and I'm going to click this button right here - "path to selection" - and that's
going to outline our subject again. So I'll come back over here to the layers panel and now I'm
going to create a new layer, and I'm just going to name this "Shadow" and click OK. And for now
I'm going to bring the shadow above our main layer here. And now I'm going to switch to the bucket
fill tool, and I'm going to click on this icon here to change this color back to black, and I'm
gonna fill in the selection area with that black and then hit ctrl+shift+a to de-select that. Now
I'm going to hit "m" on my keyboard or click right here to grab my move tool, and I'm just gonna
offset this shadow a little bit here like so, and then I'm going to click and drag the shadow
layer below our main image layer. So obviously that looks super fake, so we're going to make
it look a little bit more realistic by going to Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur. And I'm just
gonna crank the blur up on here - so we're gonna crank it up quite high and I'll click OK.
You can also decrease the opacity here of this to help it blend in a little bit more, and if you
want it to appear as if the subjects a little bit further away you can also come over here and grab
the scale tool and click on your shadow layer, and just scale it down a little bit and just make
sure you also reposition it so it's moved over a bit. And I'll click scale. So the last thing I
do is I'm going to use the Dodge and Burn tool to help blend some of these shadows that's going
on with our subjects so that we don't see so much of the lines from where we cut the subject out.
So I'm going to come over here to our main image layer and then I'll come over here to the Dodge
and Burn tool and I turn my opacity of this tool down to around 50%. And I have a pretty soft
brush here - so this is set to 50. I'm gonna make sure that my type here is set to "burn"
and I'm going to increase the size of my brush, and now I'm just going to paint a few strokes
here, and that's just going to allow the edges of our subject to blend into the shadows here. And
it just makes it look a little bit more realistic. If you think it's a little bit too dark on the
other side you can always switch over to Dodge and do the opposite so that it'll make this lighter.
I'm gonna hit ctrl+z though because I don't feel I need to do that for this particular photo. So that
is basically it - you can always go back and add a different color background if you want, and if you
need to adjust the outline around your subject you could always paint on the layer mask to refine
that line. But other than that that's it. It's a pretty simple technique. Now I can export
my photo, so I'll just go to File>Export As, and of course you can name this whatever you
want - I'll just rename this something else and I'll hit "Export." Alright so that's it
for this tutorial, hopefully you liked it if you did you can subscribe to my YouTube channel
at YouTube.com/DaviesMediaDesign. You can visit our website at DaviesMediaDesign.com. You can
enroll in my best-selling GIMP 2.10 Masterclass: From Beginner to Pro Photo Editing, and you could
support our channel and help us grow by becoming a DMD Premium Member. And I'll 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.
