How You Can Easily Change a Background with the Curvature Pen Tool in Photoshop CC

Hi I'm George Peirson. In this Photoshop video I'll be showing you how to use the new curvature pen tool which is right over here. There you go, and use this tool to make a path, use that to make a selection so that we can take a picture like this one here. Take it from this and use that path to replace the background to give us that. Now if you liked this video make sure you click that Like button and of course Share with your friends. Don't forget to hit that Subscribe button as well, and to learn a lot more about Photoshop look at my complete training titles and you'll find a link for those up there in the upper right hand corner. Okay, let's get to it [Music] I'm going to hide this picture here but we'll come back to this of course, to make our project, but first I want to show you basics about how this new curvature pen tool works. Let's just make a new file here and I'll set this at the default Photoshop size which is right there and create. There we go. Now the standard pen tool up here the way this works is if you click on a point you get straight lines between your points. Like that. If you click and drag you get a control handle and that gives you a curved line and then click back on your starting point to make a closed path. So that it's easy as you can see pretty straightforward you can then use the direct select tool here to click on these things and grab control of handles and move things around and so forth. So you have all kinds of abilities in here to adjust that you do the same thing of course with a new tool let's just delete this path here we are and as switch over here to the new curvature and tool now the main difference here is when I click on a point like that and click on another point I get curves instead of getting straight lines so it gives you a curved path instead of a straight line path and most of the time a curved path is more natural for making selections you can still get straight lines by this double clicking and you get a straight line a single click espect to curves again and then double click straight line so you can get straight lines or curved lines very easy without having to change tools or anything else also with this I can come in here I can actually come into a curve on my path or a straight line just click on the path I can get a new little control handle right there a new point without having to change tools with the old path tool have to switch tools over here to the add Anchor Point tool or delete Anchor Point tool to do that on this I don't have to I just come in here and find a spot and click and there's my new point also I can grab that point and move that around right with this new curve selection tool so it has a lot more abilities built right into the tool making it a lot easier to do very fast selections now you still can go back grab your direct select tool click on a point and you still have all your control handles and everything else just do it do everything that you could do before in here you know move your points around grab your lines all this kind of stuff all this is still available to you from the drug select tool the main difference here main to differences is that the curvature pen tool gives you curves instead of straight lines normally when you're making your points it connects those your anchor points with curves at a straight lines and all so that you can work interactively with your line a bit more using this tool so I kind of prefer using this tool instead of using the pen tool to create these paths and depending upon what kind of work you're doing making a path to use as the basis for a selection is really a very good way to go because you can do such things like this come back in and actually make adjustments okay with all that done let's go ahead and delete this whole thing and let's take a look at our project and we'll use that curvature pen tool to make a path and then convert that path for a selection and then use the selection for a layer mask I'll start off with opening up our basic file let me find my pictures there we go there it is now both of these pictures are available online and I have a materials page for this video go to that page and get the download links for these two images if you want to work along with this video using the same pictures I've used so let's open up this one it's our base picture and this just fits screen on that and here we are now for the girl in here I want to bring her in as a smart layer and the easiest way to do that is just to go up to file and then place linked right there click on that and choose place and the reason for doing that is if you resize an image just like this it goes back to the original image and resamples each time you make a change if I came in here with viii does just drag this image in here without placing it it wouldn't resample the image each time so we get better quality this way by placing it instead of just dragging and dropping into the files so let's go ahead well go ahead and place that one linked there it is now for a resize it stays in proportion you hold down the shift key and then grab all these corners and as you see here it just stays in proportion now a couple things I want to do with this I want to hide most of this leg down there because all skrￃﾤuss will be getting rid of some of that grass is the last step will make this easier just by cutting out the bottom of that picture there we go about like that and then I want to bring it up so her hat is very close to the top of the screen so again hold that shift key down let's bring her head up very close to the top of the screen kind of like that and then I mean to see where at it's going to be over in here someplace kind of in there we'll go ahead and do a final adjustment later on one of the reasons to have this again as a smart layer is that we can readjust that size later on if we need to and it's going to resample and keep the quality as high as possible for our last step when I go back in to do some clone stamp order to get rid of the grass in here we'll have to rasterize layer' first before we can do that but that's very very last step okay so that looks pretty good so about where we want that we're now ready to make our path be doing a path around the whole figure here I'll keep it fairly tight because I want to show you how to use the new curve curvature path tool and then we'll go back in we'll clean up any edges that need clean up after we've converted this to a selection using selecting mask okay so go ahead well zoom in and I'll zoom and kind of tight down here and use my little wheel on the mouse just scroll down a bit and that's pretty good let's go ahead and grab our tool now again I'm using the curvature pen tool in here because it gives us curves between points and as you can see here most of these are going to be curves and not straight lines now I tend to put in a fair number of points you don't have to it's up to you the fewer points you put in it just means you have longer occurs when you're putting in curves that you want to do is find a spot where you're seeing a change in direction that right here is kind of a change in direction right there there's a little bit of an indent right here so there'll be one here changing direction here changing direction here maybe up here so try to find where the curvature is changing and put points at those spots anchor points at those spots for the best results I'll start off just outside down here I'm starting off just outside because of it easier to find my beginning point when we finished off the selection on our path over here and come back to the beginning so starting out here just makes it easy to find that so right there and then I'll come right in right on that edge I'll put a point just there and then I'll begin putting points around the edge now keep in mind that we're going to be going back as a second step here and cleaning up or adjusting these points so you don't have to be perfect at this point just basically in the right spot I'm gonna make this a lot more perfect than we actually have to because we're doing cleanup with that select a mask tool but we'll make it real nice and tight again just to show you how to use this tool I notice I'm over here I'm kind of moving around in the pan tha's still sitting there I can always go back to that path later and add in more points hold the spacebar down and I can drag this image around whenever you see that hand it means that I'm holding down the spacebar to move the image around let's go ahead and just continue putting our points around I'll just do it up on the top of the Hat in this part and then I'll stop the video finish off the selection on the other side so don't waste all your time just watching me make points in here but here we go here's a little corner right there so come that corner double click at that point and that gives us a nice corner point and then right down here you get another car and double-click right there and then come back to putting in regular place and right here's kind of a corner just double-click right there and then I can pull that out and make nice even lines here so again it's you can see right here it's giving me a curve now around those alright double clicked it's giving me a harder edged corner and those were going to also change if you need to later on it's kind of a corner right there to see that so it's double click right there and then I'll just move around nodal corner right here double click and once again that space bar you know go from just the top of the hat and then I'll pause the video at that point yeah it's doodle double click right here and right there and there and there so just doing double click so I have corners and I want to have a straight line and then single clicks where I want to have a curved line then just work around look I'll take it this far and then we'll pause the video and I'll finish putting in this path around the rest of the figure I'll be the video back up again and we'll go back in and clean up this path using the direct select tool okay I finished off the path down to this point and here's a beginning point you see why I had that out here in the outside of the pictures just easy to see that so to finish off and close your path just go back and click on the first point they started with notice get a little kind of a circle next to my tool icon right there you see that circle click there and that just completes the patch again and give us a nice curve over there because I'm using that curvature pen tool okay that to scare our basic path we're not done with that tool let's switch over here to the direct selection tool and I'll zoom in just another little quick zoom and then once again hold the spacebar down to move the image around now let's follow along and make sure we're looking pretty good in here for this to work now you click on a path and you can then move that pointer I'll click on these anchor points you can move the path around if you grab one of these control handles you can move the path this weenus how it's moving both left and the right or the top and the bottom control handles if you want to move just one click on your path click on the anchor point hold the Alt key down and click on the one you'll want to move individual ease like that it's a little bit tricky sometimes they'll move separately sometimes they move together depends upon how the point was made if they are both white as you click on the anchor point then they'll move together if one is white and one is blue they'll move separately you can reverse that action on how that works just by holding down that Alt key okay spacebar you know do some small adjustments in here just getting things as nice and lined up as possible and you don't have to absolutely perfect at this point because we will be making a selection from this and we can then clean the selection up using that select and mask tool as well so we have two chances at cleaning up our edge one is right now and the second one is with that select a mask too it allows us to directly adjust our selection in case is all looking pretty good and here you can see there's this is a bit of a curve here like that but the actors other way again just grab a little control handles like a pull those in so that path now matches that curve this pulled out so what's going to hold down the Alt key and I can then move that one individually so it's really a matter of going through and making this little fine-tune adjustments but this is the real power of using a path to make your selections that you can go back and fine-tune that selection to make it just exactly the way you want it they can be a real nice job in here kind of matching that just by moving these control handles around okay so that's the idea here behind cleaning up your selection just take your time go around look at the selection move your control handles if they are straight across from one another and they are both white then they're going to be moving together if they are at an angle like this they'll probably move separately if they don't move separately just hold the Alt key down and they'll then move separately see everything up here that upper one is moving when this one is moving I hope they all key down and they'll now move in dependently just adjusting where all the anchor points are placing the path on this get the path as close as I can another nice thing about doing this is that the path is retained inside of the paths section which of course is right up there there's your path tab so the Panthers retain so can always go back to the path later on if I need to I haven't moved anything around or resized anything which would then put the path off I can always go back and work with that path again in the future so it gives you again a lot of freedom and control in here the mittens exactly perfect okay I'll pause the video at this point I'll finish off working on this path once that's done we'll then come back and convert that path into a selection and there's the final path and again the whole reason to use a path as your starting point to make a selection is that you can go back in and you can adjust and change this and get your path exactly perfectly right it's the only tool that allows you to have that much control over the path which means that much control over your selection okay now to turn this nook a selection make sure you're on the direct selection tool right there and then right click inside of that path and up here it says make selection I have my set with a feathering of 1 pixels kind of self as it down just a little bit in anti-aliased choose okay and there's my selection okay so far so good now I don't want to turn this into a layer mask yet because I want to clean up any edge problems with select mask let's go up here to select comes on to select and mask there's our mask in here at the top of this you can add to your selection or subtract from your selection you can adjust your pin size right here and on the right hand side you have global refinements might be bothered with any of this stuff at this point and it's collapsed that down you can choose your View mode I normally have mine set here on overlay mode it's just real easy to see but you can choose any section you want to use any technique you want to use I happen like overlay so I'll leave it at that one you can adjust the opacity of your overlay if you want if you have any need for that there's edge detection coming here and adjust your edge detection I'll leave them at the lowest setting on that for analyze edge detection and then down here we have output settings and the one that I want is output to selection this will just go back to the same selection and modify that selection okay now I'm going to zoom in let's say I just limited tools over here on the left hand side here's our resume tool let's just zoom in and take a look along the edge in here you can hold the spacebar down again and get that hand and Nautilus follow along the edge and make sure the edge looks good it looks fine I think we're okay here looks okay I could probably going in here a little bit right there we can use this tool the different buttons in here we have refine edge brush tool the brush tool quick selection tool lasso tool and the hand tool so right there upload that top tool Morse's refine edge brush that's when you want and use this what you do is you you take this circle kind of see it right there take the circle with that cross or in it and it's go right along the edge and what this does is it tells Photoshop to re-examine that spot and look for an edge and then adjust the selection to match that edge it really doesn't matter if you're inside or outside on this thing I'm gonna show you up here I'll do on the inside and it worked a tiled on the outside and it worked it as well I normally come just to the outside on this but it'll work either way now but if it goes in does too much okay a little bit of red showing up in here you can reverse this by clicking on this minus button right there and then that sets it back again so going between the plus and the minus you can really come in and fine-tune your edge okay spacebar again let's just check any little edges in here I think we're pretty good actually a little spot right in there maybe and right there now notice one thing about this is it will check the whole edge as you do this it goes back into kind of cleans up the whole thing as you're working around so it reacts Amin's everything now the only problem with that is if you're a little bit short on memory on your computer that could cause you some issues they can really slow things down so this is one tool it really likes to have a nice amount of memory available for this technique okay that's the only real problem also with Photoshop at all is that it tends to be a memory hog it likes all the memory that it can get so if you need more memory you probably should get more memory if we're gonna be using Photoshop a lot because it'll use whatever you give it okay I'm just checking the edge in here a little bit off right there I can clean that up later on hard to tell it might actually be a bit of the hat showing over the edge of the hair right there which I wanted and then down here let's come back and make sure don't go too far into that buckle there we go now let's take a look along the edge you can also just do the edges just like this you want to be just absolutely positively sure that you're okay now when this comes in and makes the adjustment and make sure to layer mask I'm gonna leave this kind of mess up spot down here it kind of messed that up well we'll fix that up on the layer mask as another step so you can always go back and adjust your layer mask as well okay that takes care of our basic look in here we'll just zoom out hold D okay let's go to fit screen so a nice cleaned up edge again we left that nest apart right there we'll fix that on the layer mask itself so you want to come out to output to selection choose okay that gives you that selection you can then use that selection to make your layer mask which is the layer mask button right down there there's your layer mask and there we go now at this point you want to come back in and take a look at your edges and see if anything has been messed up none of these tools are perfect and you will want to do some cleanup on the cleanup we're on the layer mask side look for that outline right there white shows in black height so I need to do is use your white and your black paintbrush to show or hide so let's fix that little spot down here at the bottom where this looking mask kind of messed up in here now I want to have a nice clean edge on this so I'm gonna go up here to the polygon tool selection tool and let's just make a little little selection right around the edge of our arm here just like that and out and around and back to the starting point that way I can paint in here up against that and it's not going to get into her arm over there so paintbrush black hides that's what I want anything see right here we're gonna then just clean that up very quickly just like that it's a real fast little cleanup now if I want to make sure it's nice and tight over here let's just reverse our colors and reverse your selection inverse and we can then come along this edge and make sure that we're not missing anything in there okay and then deselect that is fine so the spacebar down let's scroll to the top up here it's a little bit of a dark line showing right in there that's because we had just a little bit of feathering happening on there and that gave us that bit of a dark edge the main takeaway here is that no tool is perfect and you may need a combination of tools to achieve the best results so we'll go back here to our polygonal selection tool and I'll just make this a real quick careful selection right along the edge here and then we'll just paint right along that edge let's give it a little bit of a dark edge when you're using this particular tool take your time with it if you make the selections because it will tend to collapse on you if you aren't careful okay back to our starting point that's now selected let's go back to our black in the foreground and just a real quick paint line right along there and that cleans up that edge that's good let's now check up here because a bit messy right in there I think I can just hand do this so our paint bridge or so on the layer mask as you can see over here and this just come in and quickly do a little cleanup of some of this fuzzy stuff in there there we go that's pretty good now it's not so hot right there let's do a little better job again I'll use the polygonal tool in here and make a nice clean selection just like that back to the beginning paint brush and real quick edge in there and then desolate okay I think that's it let's go ahead and just move around okay it's a little bit messy right here I didn't spot that before let's clean that up as well so back again to our polygonal lasso tool and just make a nice tight selection right along that edge this is frequently a problem if you're going from a dark background to a light background which is what is happening right here we're getting a little bit of that dark background showing through right along the edge in there that's from the softness of the layer mask that would put in and normally only happens in just a few spots so it's just a matter of going through and catching those few little areas okay deselect and that's good if you a little bit of a dark line like in here a lot of ways of going about that you can come in and paint in again just to touch there with your paintbrush or you could use the burnin Dodge tools to darken or a lightening edge or you can do it over here adjust in the layer mask all depends on the particular specific spots so you may need to get to use a combination of tools to get exactly the effect that you want okay that looks good check our hat looks fine around the Hat let's okay on that side a little bit of a dark edge just right in there let's check this arm arm looks good this time so that's fine last little spot right there to fix I'll do the same trick again I'm just going to grab the polygonal lasso tool and make a new selection just close her in on that strip right there and then out and around back to the starting point and paint brush and right there okay I think that takes care of that looks good and it's fit on screen so there's the basic layer mask now had done and most of that work of course was done with that new curvature pen too which makes it real easy to make your initial your path for your selection now at this point we can resize our image a little bit she's a little bit too small and I want a little bit higher up and when I get this curved part of the Hat coming up here and into the background a bit better so I'll click over here to the left-hand side to make this part selected use the ctrl T keyboard shortcut to bring apart control handles now just off screen up there so I'm going to grab the zoom tool and this just back out a little bit here lots of ways to back items use the minus tool right there Emeka our plus tool that's fine and back to our standard move tool again ctrl T there's the edge up here so I can grab that again hold down that Shift key and we can then resize the image I want to bring it up about like this what I want to do is I want to have this curve or her hat getting over into the ocean and I want to still want to see that back corner back there of that pier they push it a little bit to the left kind of like that I try to keep things from lining up too much I don't really like that point there where the point of her head is let me up exactly on the horizon that's a little bit awkward make it just a little bit higher ants even get that so her had it's just off the horizon just a touch there we go you don't really want to have things exactly lining up but they don't have they it's just a little bit off otherwise they become a focal points for your eyes so make sure you're just a little bit off on those positions it's about the best I can get that right there I'm just using those up and down keys right now to kind of bump the image up and down okay there we go there's a good position on that that's taken care of click on our check mark there to sit that in place now that was again why I brought this in it's a place image instead of any other way because that kept it as a smart layer smart object so when I made that size adjustment it went back and refigured that size adjustment from the original image it's like at the quality as high as possible now at this point we're set to get rid of these leaves and branches down here and also do our value adjustments but to get rid of the leaves down here you need to do clone stamping and you can't do clone stamping on a smart object so let's take this layer and duplicate it just drag it down to the new layer button and then hide that one the reason I did that is in case I wanted to go back to that smart object and resize my image I can do that from that smart object on this copy that's right-click or the name is and rasterize layer' it's now no longer a smart object so I can now do clone stamping but at this point I also want to do my value adjustments in here first and then clone stamp once if value adjustment sorry done so it's easier to see the effect of the clone stamping so let's go up to layer come down to new adjustment layer levels right there where it says use previous layer to create clipping mask check that box and choose okay that links this adjustment just to that layer just underneath which is just her figures we're not changing the background at all now in here the left side richens up the darks the right side richens up the whites of the lights and the middle one does your middle values now already played around with this in the advice that I like I'm just type those in right down here I had 50 on the black on the mid-tones I had set this at one point 64 and on the light values I had it set at 239 that just brightens it up brings him more contrast that she more closely matches the levels of contrast we see in the background and she's just a little bit too warm right now wanna cool her down just a bit cuz it's all blue tones in the background she's a lot of warm tones in here you want to cool this down just a little bit so one more adjustment layer layer new adjustment layer this time photo filter right there again click that checkbox right there choose okay and let's change this to a cooling filter I like the cooling filter 80 it's a bit too much let's bring down our density bring it down to 15% and there it is with them without and we'll go ahead and do that one now it's up to you if you want to have that cooling filter or not I think it helps to have her blend into the picture look there's without and there's what it's a subtle thing but I think it helps to make you look a bit more naturalistic okay that disc air of all the major work all we have looked at you now is just a little bit of clone stamping down below to get rid of all this stuff always do it a little bit up here I'm not going to force you to watch me do clone stamping for all this grass aw let's do a little bit here to show what I'm doing well then skip forward and wrap the video up okay so for the clone stamp coming down to our layer down there let's zoom in and scroll up a little bit like that maybe a little bit too close Mizzou Matt just one touch there we are you move over here and grab that clone stamp tool and it simply matter then they're just cloning on top what you want get rid of all to start right over here hold the Alt key down click right there come straight across and then I'll clone that bit and there will be several passes to get this exactly right just trying to clone from spots that are a good match and then it's a process of taking your time and working through and carefully clone stamping out anything that you don't want you also come use of course these healing brushes sometimes they'll work out just fine on smaller spots I kind of like this one here that's a Spot Healing Brush it's not too good for these big long grass leaves but it's real nice as a final cleanup on those so I'm going to go ahead pause the video I'll finish up just getting rid of this stuff with the clone stamp tool and the Spot Healing Brush once that's done we'll bring this back up again and look at the finish and there we go there's our finish I did a little slight tweak on the size again as well and they just look better for the Hat position up here was quite happy with that so there we go there is the final and again the main thing I wanted to show in this video was using that new curvature pen tool there it is and again the main reason for this was to show you how to use this tool and also I can use a path as the basis for a real nice clean controllable selection there we go using the curvature pen tool to make a selection and use that selection to change a background thank you for watching my video I hope you found it useful if you like this video click on the like button below to let others know you can click the subscribe button so you don't miss any of my videos in the future and frequently uploading new training videos don't forget to check out my website at houck aguru Zeng calm

Channel: How To Gurus

Views: 2,618

Keywords: curvature pen tool, new curvature pen tool, curvature pen tool in photoshop cc 2018, photoshop curvature pen tool, photoshop curvature pen, curvature pen photoshop, photoshop curvature tool, adobe photoshop, change background photoshop, change background photoshop cs6, how to change background photoshop, photoshop background change, photoshop background removal, photoshop background effects, photoshop backgrounds, photoshop background transparent, photoshop background tutorial

Id: uiTd562UfFQ

Length: 32min 54sec (1974 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 07 2018