How To Remove a Background In Photoshop [For Beginners!]

in this video i'm going to show you how to remove backgrounds in photoshop this tutorial is meant for beginners that means that i'm going to go slow and deliver all the information in digestable chunks so that you can follow along also if you want to try out these techniques using the same photo that i'm going to use look in the description below you'll find the link to my website where you can download the photo also if you see anything in this video that you enjoy or that teaches you something make sure that you click on that like button and subscribe to the photoshop training channel let's jump right into the tutorial this is the image that we're going to work with it's of a woman running through a bridge and what we're going to do is remove the background now there's a lot of ways of removing backgrounds in photoshop what i'm going to do here show you a technique that should work in most cases and when it doesn't all you need to do is continue fine-tuning the image a little bit further and the image should work but keep in mind there's a lot of ways of removing backgrounds in photoshop i'm just showing you a technique that i think will work in most cases and it's actually very simple let me show you how that works the first step obviously is to open up the image once your image is open in photoshop all you need to do is go into select and select and mask this is a dedicated workspace that helps you make precise selections and masks on the left hand side you'll see a toolbar which is a limited set of tools also found in the regular photoshop interface the tools here allow you to either make a selection or edit a selection as well as zoom and pan around the image above that you'll see the options bar which gives you more settings for the currently selected tool and to the right you'll see the adjustable properties these controls can help you further fine tune your mask or selection by default you will be in the onion skinning mode and the transparency will be set to 50 the transparency simply allows you to see the pixels that you have selected up against the original image in this case we don't have anything selected so the original image is viewed at 50 opacity so once we start selecting something you'll see that the selected pixels will be shown as 100 opacity there's a lot of ways of making selections in a selected mask workspace if you want to select something specific like an article of clothing then you can start your selection with the quick selection tool you can enable it from the toolbar then you can click and drag over the image and photoshop will automatically find the edges of the areas that you click and drag over you could also use the subtract option by clicking on this icon or even better holding alt on windows option on the mac and clicking and dragging to deselect from the areas that you didn't intend to select that's one way of starting your selection in your image if you're working in newer versions of photoshop like photoshop 2021 like i am now then you can use artificial intelligence known as adobe sensei to make your selections one way of making that selection is by simply clicking on the select subject button right up here when you click on that photoshop will first tell me if i want to remove the selection i already created i do i want to disregard that selection and photoshop will simply analyze the image and select the main subject photoshop does a fantastic job it only took one click the selection is not perfect but you can always fine tune it to get the results that you want also as a side note i want to show you a tool that will allow you to do this in an image that has two subjects but you only want to keep one so i'm gonna quickly switch over to a different image show you how that works and then we'll come back to this image in this image we have two women jumping so if i simply click on select subject photoshop will select both women but what if you only wanted to select one person well what you can do instead is enable the object selection tool and make sure that you have the lasso mode active and you can simply click and drag a very loose selection out of the person that you want to keep and photoshop's ai will analyze the image and make a selection out of the main subject in the area that you defined with the object selection tool so if you have an image with one or more subjects then use the object selection tool to select your main subject with ai and if your image only has one subject then simply click on the select subject button but anyway back to our original image again i created this selection by clicking on the select subject button to automatically generate my selection these automatically generated selections are not perfect they do require some fine tuning so let's work on that next i'm going to select the zoom tool and i'll zoom into her shoe and you'll see that photoshop's ai missed a couple areas and you want to bring these areas back by adding to the selection and there's a few ways of doing that first of all you can use the quick selection tool make sure that the add option is enabled and you can click and drag for photoshop to analyze the areas that you paint over and bring those pixels back you could also enable the brush tool and you can add by clicking on this icon and simply paint in any missing details like the shoelace here see that how i'm painting the shoelace back in and you can use the space bar to pan and look for other areas that you can adjust and spend your time fine tuning your image obviously in this example i'm not going to spend a lot of time fine tuning these small details but make sure that you do spend the time in your projects because they will make a big difference what i'm going to do now is fix the mask edge and i'll double click on the hand tool to fit the image to screen so that we can see the entire image so what do i mean by mask edge this in reality will become a layer mask a non-destructive way of hiding pixels so i want to adjust the edges of the mask so that they don't look jagged or blurry or have any imperfections so that the cutout looks realistic in this panel we have the global refinement sliders that you can see here smooth feather contrast and shift edge these sliders will control the edges of your mask and i know that if you're starting out you might not know what that means so i'll zoom in to her legs here and i can scroll up and under view i'll select black and white so this is what my mask will look like with a mask white reveals and black conceals her silhouette is white because we're going to keep her and what i want to do is remove all the jaggedness in this mask so that we have a better cutout first of all i like to increase the smooth slider so that we can smooth out these edges see how much smoother the edges look now and all we had to do is simply use the smooth slider then i like to increase the contrast to make these edges sharper in some cases you may need to feather your edges feathering means blurring so when i drag this over to the right you'll see how the edges are now blurry i don't want to do that in this case so i'll leave it set to zero next i can shift the edge in or out the reason that you may want to do that is that a lot of times when you create a selection you might see some halos around the edges of your mask and shifting the edge in will help you prevent that let me show you what i mean by that i'm going to go back up and under view i'm going to select on black so that i can see my selection up against the black background and that will make the white edges or halo stand out and notice how there's a few edge halos here on these edges this is also known as fringing and what i'm going to do is simply shift the edge in by dragging to the left and you can see that photoshop will reduce those edge halos if some of these imperfections are too extreme it's much easier to simply paint them away so you can select the brush tool click on the minus button and then just paint away these imperfections as best as you can and again in your project spend a little more time than i am fine tuning these small details i'll double click on the hand tool to fit the image to screen and you might notice that we haven't touched her hair at all and that's on purpose i like to do two steps in making selections the first step is usually for selecting the entire body and then the second step is for the hair in my opinion you get better results if you separate the two selections so let me show you how to continue on and do the second adjustment i'm going to click and drag down and under output i'm going to output us a layer mask and i'll press ok and photoshop will remove the background using a layer mask a layer mask is a non-destructive way of hiding pixels in other words you can always come back and bring back pixels that you hid also the select and mask workspace can edit a layer mask so what we're going to do now is go back into the selected mask workspace and work with the model's hair to do so make sure that the layer mask is active you can tell that it's active when you see the white outline the focus over the layer mask thumbnail then from the properties panel click on select and mask and what i'm going to do now is use this brush here the refine edge brush and notice that when i paint with this brush photoshop will analyze the pixels around her hair and it will make a better job selecting them and the reason that i'm making all these adjustments on a separate step and not on the original adjustment is so that the global refinement adjustments do not affect the hair the smoothing the contrast and the shift edge were all intended for the edges around her body and the edges around her hair are very different so you usually will not get good results if you use the same technique for both so i like to separate them so now i can just focus on the hair and all you need to do is simply just continue painting and photoshop will analyze the image and remove the background also in photoshop 2021 and newer you can use the refine hair button to use artificial intelligence to locate the hair and basically apply the same adjustment as the refine edge brush tool in this case it didn't do that good of a job on her face so i'm not happy with this result so i'll undo that and simply apply this effect manually and not with the ai also select the brush tool and enable the add feature and add to the selection in areas that need a little work like here we lost a little bit of those highlights that i think we needed and now that everything is looking great i'm going to output to a layer mask i'll press ok and photoshop applies the mask adjustments to our previous mask next i'm going to go into the new adjustment layer icon and select solid color and i'm going to make a background for this image the color is not important so i'll just make it pink and press ok and i can drag this layer below our runner layer so that we can see what the background looks like at this point you may find some imperfections in your mask and that's okay you can always paint with the brush tool and add or subtract to your mask by painting with white to add and black to subtract let me show you how that works i'm going to select the zoom tool and i'm going to zoom in to her other shoe and you might notice that we have a few imperfections if the imperfections are difficult to see you can sort of create an onion skinning mode here let me show you how to do that you can select your layer mask and from the properties panel you can reduce the density slider and that will reveal some of the original background see that so now you can see that we're missing a lot of her shoe so we can paint that back in on the layer mask using the brush tool with the brush tool you can paint with white or black on this mask to reveal or hide pixels white reveals the foreground color is white so when we paint we'll reveal those pixels with black we can hide pixels also a really useful shortcut for this is the x key on the keyboard which swaps between the foreground and background color so you can paint with white and then if you make a mistake you can quickly tap on the x key to swap to black as the foreground color and then you can paint those away at this point spend some time doing the final adjustments to your mask and you should have a great cutout when you're done obviously i'm not going to spend a lot of time in this video making these small adjustments but make sure that you do spend the time in your project when you're done just bring the density slider back up to 100 percent also i want to point out that there is a feature that allows you to make mask really quickly that i didn't talk about but i want to point it out to show you how it works i need to delete my layer mask so i'll right click on it and i'll select delete layer mask and you can see here in the properties panel that when you have a layer selected there will be a remove background button when you click on that photoshop will use the same artificial intelligence inside the selected mask workspace to analyze your image make a selection and create a layer mask all in one go and the reason that i didn't use this to start is because after doing this i still need to make those adjustments that i made to my mask as using the same artificial intelligence so i still need to select my mask and go into selected mask to make my adjustments so you can use either method but since this video is for beginners i wanted to keep it all in one workspace so that it was easier to understand but you do have this option if you need it i'm going to undo this and bring back my mask that i have been editing and the last thing that i'll show you is how to bring a photo as a layer to replace the background to do so you can go into file and select place embedded i have this new background here i'm going to place it over my image and i will click the check mark to commit the changes and there she is in a new background for those of you that are a little more advanced you'll know that there's a few things missing like shadows highlights color matching if you're new and you want to learn how to do that then check out this video i talk all about placing a foreground element into a completely different background and i show you how to tackle all those extra things that you need to do to make a composite look realistic and if you want to learn more about masking then check out this tutorial where i talk all about the minimum and maximum filter they're great tools to use when you're masking and they will help you a lot so make sure that you check either of these tutorials out thank you so much for watching again my name is jesus ramirez if you found anything in this video useful make sure that you click on that like button and let me know in the comments down below what that was and if you're new to the photoshop training channel then click on that subscribe and notification button so that you don't miss any new photoshop tutorials thank you so much for watching i'll talk to you again in the next video

Channel: Photoshop Training Channel

Views: 1,580,216

Keywords: How To Remove a Background In Photosho, remove the background from your photos in Photoshop, Photoshop remove background, remove background, how to remove background in photoshop, remove background photoshop, remove background in photoshop, cutout background in photoshop, jesus ramirez, jrfromptc, photoshop training channel, photoshop tutorial, ptcvids

Id: BQQqnn2uZv4

Length: 14min 42sec (882 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021