How to Erase Your Ex From a Photo Using GIMP

hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'll show you how to erase your ex from your favorite photo using I'll be using conversion to point 10.20 which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial [Music] before I get into that don't forget to check out my website at Davies media design.com as always I have tons of video tutorials on here my book of layers and free software to help articles so definitely check that out you can roll in my 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy you can enroll in any of my skill share classes by visiting school calm and you can get more with a premium membership to Davies media design I'll include all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video here is the photo we'll be working with for today's tutorial this is the after photo shift-click on here you guys can see this is the before photo so I'll be showing you how to erase somebody from a photo here and this is a pretty complicated background but this is a very effective technique it's going to be using a free plugin called the resynthesizer plugin I actually have a tutorial on how to download and install this plug-in for both Windows and Mac I believe it also works for Linux as well I'll link that video to this tutorial for those of you who want to check it out but for starters I'm going to open up the original image so I'll go to file open or open recent in my case and I'll click on the original photo and I'll hold ctrl and zoom in with my mouse wheel so I'll grab my path tool or my Bay's a curves tool you can hit the B key on your keyboard or click on it in the tool box I do have a single column tool box setup here and I have it tutorial on how to do that if you want to check that out but hold ctrl zoom in as far as I need to and I just need to select the parts of the person I want to erase so I'm going to start right here on the arm of our main subject so this is the person we're going to keep and I'm just going to click and then click and drag my mouse to create curves along here it doesn't have to be totally perfect but the closer you can get it the better the final product will look I'm just clicking and dragging my mouse along here and then once we get at the end of this portion here where the two are intersecting then we don't have to be quite as precise so we can just click close to the person that we want to erase but we don't have to totally follow the contours of their body or their head etc so relatively close here also the less room we leave the less work we're gonna have to do later so we do want to get fairly close so as we get close here I'm going to make sure I select out this portion bring it back in hold ctrl zoom in with my mouse wheel and we're going to hold the ctrl key and create a union between our first and last path that way we have a nice enclosed path so here is our selected person we want to remove or the X next what I need to do is come over to my tool options for the paths tool and click selection from path so that I'll create a selection area around our person then I'm going to come over here and I want to duplicate the original image layer so now we have a backup layer once we have this backup layer now I can erase the subject so for starters what I'll do is come over to filters enhance heal selection and I have this set to 54 the pixels all around as the sample from and random for the filling order and I'll press ok so there is essentially our first pass at this so it's not gonna look perfect at first I'll hey control shift 8 to deselect it everybody's final result here will look different depending on the type of photo you're using but what I'll do is hit the C key on my keyboard that will grab my clone tool and I'll hold ctrl and zoom in so this part looks weird I don't know what that is it's her hand right here and I'll increase it it kind of look like some floating heart or something you would see from like a time machine gone bad anyway I'm gonna hold the ctrl key and click to grab a source area and we're just gonna paint over these pixels that are different like so we're gonna try to keep these areas as similar as possible let me hold the ctrl key I have to redo this part and we could do this as well we could probably use the heal tool for this but I will just use the ctrl key here and then up top here there are some areas that don't look as good so for example this tree so I'll hold the ctrl key and paint that tree out using the clone tool and then same with this area right here hold ctrl and click to grab a source area and then paint on what's called the destination area same with right here and right here as well so there are some parts here that need to be fixed we're gonna fix that a bit later on but now come down here and holding ctrl and zooming in now you'll see there are some seams going on here and there's also a shadow that we need to take care of so for some of this stuff we're going to use another technique which I do go over in my 5 ways to remove anything from a photo in so what I'm gonna do is come over here and grab my lasso tool and hold ctrl zoom in a bit closer so this part because it's pretty much homogeneous here the areas to the left and right are pretty much the same and once I draw this by the way and connect it I'll hit the enter key what I can do because these areas are so much the same is just come over here duplicate this area hit the M key on my keyboard and then just move this to the left holding the ctrl key to drag it in straight-line out so probably about right there fine and then I can right-click and go to add layer mask and under initialize layer mask - I'll choose selection and click add control shift a to deselect that so here you can see this looks pretty good now hold ctrl zoom out we're gonna do the same for this area right here so I'm going to come back up here grab my lasso tool and we're going to just outline the shadow that was here and then get as close to this as we possibly can and come over here hit the enter key and once again I'm going to duplicate our original layer we were working on and just drag this to the very top and then I'll hit the M key to grab my move tool and click and drag this one upwards just because the area underneath looks more similar so about right there and then once again right-click add layer mask choose selection and click Add and there you can see the effect of that control shift 8 to deselect it and now we have a pretty good looking image there so now what I'll do is just merge these two layers to the layer below so first I'll apply the layer mask so I'll right click apply layer mask so that just leaves this one area here this little area down here and then I'll come down to the next one do the same thing so right click apply layer mask I'll come back up top and I'm just going to hit the merge down button and then hit it again and so that will merge those two layers onto our original layer and there you can see this is already doing a good job of erasing those shadows and all those seams but we do need to fix these little seams here so I'll hit the H key on my keyboard and what I'll do now is come over and click to create a new layer and this one I'll name heal and fill it with transparency and click OK and you want to make sure in the tool options this is set to sample merged hold ctrl zoom in I also have my hardness set to a little bit below 50 and the force I'll set that also to around 50 I do have an entire tutorial dedicated to using the heal tool so definitely check that out but because I have sample merged turned on for the heel tool when I control click to grab a source area that's going to grab from the pixels below here the layers below versus just the heel layer up top so you can see now that as I paint that'll help to get rid of the seam this area right here didn't turn out great but we can fix that let me decrease the size of this and now we'll paint over those areas and then let me increase the size of this again hold ctrl click over here and once again paint over those seams so remember the heel tool is also known as the seamless cloning tool so it does help to get rid of seams and that can help blend things together let me back up here this isn't looking great and we can also come up top here do the same thing so there's a little bit of a seam there increase the size of this there's a bit of a seam there and you can increase or decrease your brush using the left or right brackets on the keyboard and then down here same thing hold ctrl and click let's decrease the brush with the left bracket and just work on let me hit control Z trying to blend this area better and again it doesn't have to be perfect it just has to be you know realistic looking hold ctrl and zoom out that's looking pretty good the last area we need to work on is this tree here so as you can see part of this has been cut out and actually we also need to get rid of the creepy hand right here so let me actually do that first while we're still on the heal layer so let's decrease that switch over to the clone tool by hitting the C key on the keyboard or you can grab it from this tool group here hold ctrl and click and we'll just clone out the creepy hands and it'll just look like her sleeve is covering up her hand there hold ctrl and zoom out it does kind of look like she doesn't have a hand but it's not terrible and actually let's quickly copy that hand and see if we can get that to look realistic so B to grab the path tool let's come down here to our layer and I'm just going to quickly outline the hand like so hold ctrl click hold ctrl click and drag to create handles once we have the path drawn around the hand I'll want to turn this into a selection area so I'll come over here and click selection from path making sure we're on our photo layer here I'll hit ctrl C to copy that and then ctrl shift a to deselect the selection area and ctrl V to paste and let's put this on its own layer so here's the floating selection it creates well put it on its own layer hit the M key to grab the move tool and let's move this over here and we need to place this above the heal layer so click and drag that and of course this is backwards so I'll hit shift F to grab the flip tool and make sure this is set to horizontal and click to flip it shift R to rotate it and so we'll just rotate it until it looks natural like that hit rotate now we need to erase the part that goes behind the sleeve I'll just have the hand kind of barely sticking out so we can't really see a whole lot of the detail here so I'll come over to the paste and layer right click go to add layer mask and choose white full opacity and click Add hold ctrl zoom in make sure that our foreground and background color is black and white clicking that little icon I'll hit the P key on my keyboard to grab my paintbrush tool and on the layer mask I'm just going to now paint black and then I can hit the X key to switch to white and then X to switch back to black we can erase some of this green and I'm not going to spend too much time on that but now looks like she has her hand barely sticking out of there so it doesn't look as much like she only has one hand finally let's fix the tree portion so I'll come over here create a new layer and I'll name this paint fill it with transparency and click OK now I'm going to hit the a key on my keyboard or grab the airbrush tool from in my tool box and hold ctrl and zoom in and actually real quick what I want to make sure is if I come down here the color picker tool has an option for sample merged so make sure that option is checked and then hit the a key again to grab the airbrush tool the reason being is when I hold the control key and click that will grab my color picker tool and that will pick from all of the layers again instead of just the transparent layer on the very top so that ensures we can grab these tree colors and I'm going to increase the size of the airbrush tool and I'm just going to very loosely try to paint the tree trunk in and I'm no artist no Bob Ross but you could see this will look pretty convincing at the end despite that so hold ctrl click to grab this green color here and we're just going to fill in the gap very loosely hold control so holding ctrl zoom in a bit all right and the last thing I'm going to do for this tree is hold ctrl and click to grab this highlight and let's just increase the brush a bit I'm just going to try to mimic this highlight here on the tree which is kind of hard with the mouse if you have a Wacom tablet I definitely recommend using that at this portion alright so there is the tree and here's a before here's an after what we need to do is sort of match the blur that's going on here to the lens blur behind so if you're using to point 10 point 20 you can use the lens blur filter and I'll do that by going to filters blur Lens Blur and there you can see the effect of this I'm going to turn it down a bit it doesn't need to be that high like so and I'll click OK so hold ctrl zoom out and hold ctrl zoom in let's also just real quick fix this last little area so I'll hit the H key to grab my heal tool hold ctrl and click and let's just heal this little seam I can see right here is bugging me and maybe this portion there and now she can happily move on with the rest of her life all right so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did you could check out my youtube channel at youtube.com slash Davey's media design don't forget to subscribe and click the bell icon to be notified each time I have a brand new tutorial you could check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video but thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 29,102

Rating: 4.9465022 out of 5

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2020, remove someone, remove a person, object removal, remove an ex, photo manipulation, GIMP 2.10.20

Id: uZfRUvpECL0

Length: 15min 9sec (909 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 14 2020