How to Remove Backgrounds in Affinity Photo (For Beginners!)

in this video i'll show you three simple steps to remove the background from any photo using these steps you'll be well on your way to becoming an affinity photo master let's get started if you'd like to follow along with me i've left a download link for today's photo in the video description the first step for removing backgrounds is to make a rough selection of your subject to do this we'll get out the selection brush with this tool we can paint a selection across our subject and affinity will do its best to figure out what we're trying to select depending on the size of your subject you might want to increase or decrease the size of your brush from the context toolbar alternatively you can use the bracket keys on your keyboard once you have a good brush size painting your selection will go much faster our selection is looking pretty good now but if we zoom in a little bit you will be able to see that we accidentally selected some of the background to remove these areas from our selection we need to change our brush from add mode to subtract mode you could also hold down alt or option on your keyboard and the selection brush tool will remove from your selection as long as you keep that shortcut key held down i'm going to make my brush smaller and then hold down alt or option as i click and drag to remove these areas for my selection now we've removed most of the background from our selection but her hair is still not being selected very well to fix this press refine at the top this dialog box gives us quite a few options but the most common option is matte with this turned on we can paint over hair and affinity will try to do a better job selecting it now that we're done refining our selection we can press apply at the bottom to zoom back out press command or control zero now that we have our subject selected it's time to move on to step number two masking first apply a mask by pressing on the mask icon at the bottom of the layers panel then to get rid of our selection press command or ctrl d d for deselect using our mask we've been able to remove the background but the great thing is the background actually isn't gone it's just being hidden we can turn this mask off and on whenever we want to hide or reveal the background if you look at our masks layer icon you can see that there is a white silhouette in the shape of our model with black surrounding her white silhouette masks are a special type of layer which allow you to hide parts of a photo the white parts of a mask are kept visible in the main photo area while the black parts of the mask are hidden when you apply a mask everything you had selected stays white in the mask while everything you didn't have selected becomes black if you're new to masking i like to remember how masks work by thinking of daytime and night time at night everything is black and you can't see anything just like how a black mask hides parts of the photo on the other hand everything in the daytime is bright white and easy to see just like how we can see the parts of the photo that have a white mask if that seems strange don't worry masks become second nature over time okay now we're ready for the final step refining your mask to refine a mask you first need to evaluate it and see what needs to be improved in our example the hair on top of her head looks a little messy we can also see that affinity didn't do a perfect job with the other parts of her hair this is a common problem you'll run into masking hair is very difficult with enough time and practice you can perfectly select hair but in this situation i think we'd be better off just hiding some parts of these messy areas that will save us a lot of time and frustration let's also check with the rest of our mask to see if anything else needs to be improved to do this turn the mask off and on and look around the rest of the photo i'm noticing that we missed part of her elbow at the top left but that will be easy to fix it also looks like we missed part of her shirt down here okay now that we know what needs to be fixed what do we do now well what we're going to do is paint on our mask to change some white parts to black and some black parts to white by doing this we can change which parts of the photo are visible to do this we need to get out the paintbrush tool which you can do by pressing the letter b on your keyboard b for brush then make sure you're painting in white so that we can reveal hidden parts of our photo also set your brush hardness to zero percent so that our brush strokes are nice and soft next select the mask so that we can paint on it as a small tip be careful that you select the mask and not the photo otherwise you'll put white paint directly onto the photo instead of affecting which parts of the photo are visible now we can begin painting in white to reveal parts of the photo that we accidentally hid and don't worry if you paint too much with white just change your color to black and then you can hide those parts of the photo again remember black is like nighttime and it will make it so you can't see parts of your picture that looks much better now let's come up a little bit and fix her elbow since we accidentally hid too much of her elbow we need to paint with white to reveal it again we could come back over to the color panel to change our color or we can use the shortcut key x which switches your paint color and just as before you can switch your paint back to black to hide any parts of the photo that you accidentally painted white personally though i like painting a little too much with white and then painting in black to hide the parts i don't want to keep i think that's easier than trying to perfectly paint everything in white right from the beginning next let's work on her hair at the top this just doesn't look very good so we're going to paint with black to completely hide it in situations like this i like to paint with a small brush right along the edge and after that i'll use the bracket keys to make my brush bigger so that i can quickly paint over the rest of the area it might seem like cheating to hide parts of the photo instead of making a perfect mask but trust me no one will notice a difference and you just saved yourself an hour of work next we'll clean up this area over here we'll use a nice small brush to paint away any areas that are part of the background and are supposed to be hidden then we'll come over to the other side and do the same thing i think our mask looks a lot better now but it's still not perfect for example i could come up here and zoom in with a small brush to paint away this little bit of green fringing on her sleeve does this make our mask better of course is it worth your time maybe but maybe not in cases like this it's a good idea to zoom back out and see if you notice anything from a normal viewing distance speaking from experience it's pretty frustrating to spend a lot of time working on something only to not see a difference from a regular viewing distance okay now let's see what we've accomplished in this video if i come over here and turn the mask off and on you can see that we've successfully used the three-step method to remove the model's background just make a rough selection of your subject apply a mask and then refine the mask before we end though i have one last tip for you and that's how to save your photo with a transparent background first come up to file and then down to export normally most photos are exported as jpegs but jpeg photos do not support transparent backgrounds anything that's transparent in your photo will be turned white when you export it as a jpeg instead you need to export your photo as a png png will keep transparent areas transparent and with that you are now ready to remove the background from any photo if you want to learn more affinity photo techniques then you can check out my free course in the video description this course will teach you 10 simple steps you can use to make any of your photos look amazing well thanks for watching my friends and i'll see you in the next affinity revolution tutorial

Channel: Affinity Revolution

Views: 100,220

Keywords: affinity photo, tutorial, backgrounds, remove, select, transparent, mask

Id: 23oVnoTW3r8

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021