Insanely Difficult Selections MADE EASY with Alpha Channels in Photoshop

welcome back to the photoshop training channel i'm jesus ramirez in this video i'm going to show you how to create channel based selections and masks to create better cutouts in photoshop if you want to follow along with this tutorial make sure that you look below in the description for a link to my website where you'll find this file a lot of times when you're doing cutouts in photoshop you may come across images like this one where the fur is up against the busy background and it may be difficult to select so what i'm going to do is show you a technique where you will use the channels panel to better select those difficult to select areas so why don't we jump right into the tutorial so this is the image that i'm going to work with and as you can see it's a beautiful dog and before we do anything i want to show you the relationship between a selection or a mask and the channels panel so if i were to make a selection the selection doesn't matter so i'll just make a rectangular marquee selection then if i were to go into select save selection to save the selection i can give it a name i'll just call it selection the name is not important for this example photoshop will save that selection where does photoshop save the selection well it saves it in the channels panel here it is that's my selection see that also if i were to just create a random selection here with the lasso tool and create a layer mask by clicking the layer mask icon then going to the channels panel you'll see that the background mask is here so what does all this mean well this means that selections and masks are really the same thing as channels what is a channel well a channel the rgb channels there's three of them the red the green and the blue channel and these channels allow you to create the images that you see on screen the red channel controls the red light the green channel controls the green light and the blue channel controls the blue light when you see bright areas in the channel that you're on that means that there's a lot of light in the color of that channel and dark areas means that there's less light of the color of that channel and you'll see the opposite color so the opposite color of red is cyan the opposite color of green is magenta and the opposite color of blue is yellow that's not important for that tutorial but i still wanted to give you that information the point is that you can use these channels the ones that you can see here in the channels panel to create a selection or a mask so the red channel the green channel and the blue channel to not confuse you i'm going to delete the selection channel that we created earlier and what we're going to do is use one of these rgb channels to create our selection and what you have to do is click on all the channels and see which one has the most contrast between the foreground and background in this case i'm only really concerned about the edges here on the fur so i'm trying to see where the fur looks its brightest and where the background looks its darkest and i think that the red channel probably does a better job in creating that type of contrast that i'm looking for now before we continue i do want to mention that if you're actually looking at the color of the channel for example if you see red on the red channel you need to disable that to do so you can press ctrl k on windows command k on the mac to bring up the preferences panel and from the interface tab make sure that you disable show channels in color see that see how the channel is now looking red because i have that enabled so make sure that you disable that and you should be able to see what i'm looking at now once you identify the channel with the most contrast between the foreground and background or at the very least the channel that has most contrast between the edges of the foreground in the background you can duplicate it you can duplicate a channel by clicking and dragging it into the new channel icon you do not want to work in the original channel because if you alter the original channel then you'll destroy the colors in the image and you don't want to do that so always duplicate the channel that you're going to work on so with my red copy selected i can start making adjustments and what i wanted to do is keep the dog as bright as possible and the background as dark as possible so usually what i like to do is start with the dodge or burn tools to darken with the burn tool or to brighten with the dodge tool so in this case i'll select the burn tool from the options bar i can select the range of pixels that i want to affect so i want to affect the shadows that way i can darken the shadows and not the highlights the exposure is a bit high so i'll reduce it and that way when i pin along the edges you'll see that the background gets darker and i don't really affect the fur in the foreground like so so i can keep painting over the image like you see here obviously take a little more time in your projects i'm going a little quickly here to save your time but as you'll see i will still get good results notice that i'm having an issue down here where the first actually black but the background is white that's not too difficult to fix all i have to do is select this area like so and then press ctrl i and windows command i on the mac to invert so that now the fur that's inside is white and the background is black and i can continue the same technique that i was doing on the top part of this dog and i'll just keep painting the edges here like so notice that i'm not being precise i'm being very loose and that's okay you don't need perfect selections to create good layer masks so it's okay to be a little sloppy but not too sloppy as long as you have defined edges and define fur you should be okay so you don't have to get every single strand and it's okay to disregard things that are too difficult to select but anyway now that the outer edges are black i can select the lasso tool and from here i can just make a very loose selection around the image like so it doesn't have to be precise at all i'm just going through the outside here and then i can fill this with black black is my foreground color so i can press alt and backspace on windows that's option delete on the mac to fill with the foreground color which is currently black then i can press ctrl d on windows command d on the mac to deselect and i can continue painting with the brush tool using black just to get rid of these areas like so and then i can do the opposite i can select the dodge tool make sure that i have highlights enabled exposure i'll bring it down lower as well and i'll just paint on here just to try to make these edges brighter so anything inside the dog should be bright you can always go into image adjustment levels and also fine tune the adjustment this way as well so you can decide which adjustment or tool gives you the right brightening effect for your image it really doesn't matter to be frank with you which technique you use as long as you make the right pixels bright and the right pixels dark once you're done you can grab the lasso tool once again and just make a very rough selection around the dog like so and you can just fill with white ctrl backspace on windows to fill with the background color which is currently white ctrl d on windows command d on the mac to deselect and make sure that the foreground color is white so i'll tap on the x key to swap the foreground and background colors and i'll paint on the edges you might want to be a little more careful in areas like the ear i'll zoom in in a moment to work on those but i just want to get these edges first and we have a really sharp edge here that might not work so i'm just going to push up a little bit to soften that edge up and i'll zoom in to the ear and i can paint and i'm tapping on the left bracket key on the keyboard to reduce my brush size as you see here and i just have my hand on those bracket keys so that i can adjust the brush size as i paint and again notice that i'm being very loose i don't like to be precise with my layer mask into the very end until i actually put it up against the background because a lot of times the background that you have will actually conceal some of the imperfections of your mask so it doesn't make much sense to me to spend a lot of time fine tuning the mask if ultimately it's not going to make a difference on the background that you're going to put it on so everything looks good to me at the moment so what i'll do is i'll hold control on windows command on the mac and click on the channels panels red copy thumbnail here it is that loads it as a selection then i can go into the layers panel and just create a layer mask and notice that the background is now gone let me go into the new adjustment layer icon and create a solid color fill layer and i'll just make it a dark gray and drag it to the bottom so that you can see the result as you can see the mask looks pretty good all we got to do now is make a few minor adjustments to fine tune the edges to get better results so what i'm going to do now is zoom in and show you a couple problems you can see the green of the original background above the dog and other areas so what i like to do at this point is create a new layer a blank layer clip it to the layer below a clipping mask makes it so that the layer below controls the visibility of the layer on top so that way we don't have to worry about creating masks and we can paint freely without worrying about going over the edges so with this layer you can press ctrl alt g on windows command option g on the mac then i can select the brush tool and while the brush tool is active you can hold alt on windows option on the mac to temporarily enable the eyedropper tool and then you can click to sample the color and you can paint notice that when i paint i'm just painting a solid color and that sort of fixes the problem but i think you'll get much better results if you change the blending mode to color so that you keep the original brightness but you just hide the edges the green edges and you can just keep sampling from different areas like so and just try to remove those green edges that way the image looks much much better and just keep sampling from the areas that you're painting on i know i'm being pretty loose here but as i said before do a better job in your image notice that we have a problem here on this area and that's actually quite easy to fix what you can do is select the lasso tool and just make a selection like so i'm going to press ctrl shift c to do a copy all so basically everything that's below that layer not just the layer that i'm currently on and then ctrl v to paste and i'm going to make this into a clipping mask ctrl alt g on windows command option g on the mac and just drag that over and press ctrl t command t to transform and rotate it so that the fur follows the fur below then i can hold alt on windows option on the mac and click on the layer mask icon to make it into a black layer mask to hide everything in there and with the brush tool with white as the foreground color i can just selectively paint these areas back in just so that it looks like the fur is extending all the way to the edge so this is the before and the after and what i'll do now is select the zoom tool and zoom in so that you can see the edges they look really really good and if i were to throw in a background that had more detail maybe with trees and other distracting elements those edges will look even better so keep that in mind in some cases you might get these pieces of fur that don't look that good i might consider removing those it totally depends and another way that you can fix the edges on the fur is by creating a custom brush and painting in the fur by hand and if you want to learn how to do that make sure that you check out this video here thank you so much for watching and i'll talk to you again very soon

Channel: Photoshop Training Channel

Views: 216,800

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Id: _IYea3raR5s

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021