Hi. Welcome back to the PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com. I'm Jesus Ramirez. In this video, I'm going to show you a great
way to create smooth cut-outs in Photoshop. We will work on three projects where we will
remove the background from a photo. First, we will work on a basic example so
that you understand the concepts, and we will increase the complexity as we move forward. The goal of this tutorial is to show you how
you can get clean, smooth, and well-defined edges on your cut-outs. You're probably already familiar with layer
masks. They are the pixel-based images that allow
you to hide or reveal pixels based on the shade of gray that you paint with. Black hides, and white reveals. The different levels of gray give you different
levels of opacity. Layer masks are great for intricate cut-outs,
such as hair, plants, and other organic objects. But if you want the smoothest, sharpest, and
most well-defined cut-outs as possible, then you will have to use a Vector Mask. A Vector Mask is a mask based on a vector, which is a mathematical equation
that doesn't rely on pixels. Therefore, you can resize and transform your
vector without ever degrading its appearance. And vectors always give you crisp, sharp lines
that are never jagged. They're also usually more accurate than layer
masks, especially on man-made objects with sharp edges, making them ideal for masking
all kinds of products. But as you will see in this tutorial, you
can also use Vector Masks to remove the background from photos with people. And before we get started, I just want to
ask you to please click on that like button if you find the technique useful. Also, if this is your first time at The Photoshop
Training Channel, then don't forget to click on that subscribe and notification buttons. Okay? Let's get started. This is the first example. This is the basic example, and from this,
we're going to build on with different techniques and end up at the example that you saw in
the introduction. If we wanted to select this bag, there's a
lot of ways of doing it. But one of the most efficient and effective
ways of doing it so that you have smooth edges is by using vectors. Let me show you how that works. You can create vectors in Photoshop with a
pen tool and the Curvature Pen Tool. The Curvature Pen Tool is new to Photoshop
CC, and the pen tool has been around in Photoshop forever. And what the pen tool allows you to do is
create paths. In the options bar,
make sure that you select path. You can click, and you can follow along your
image to create a path. And notice how I'm just clicking on the corners,
and I'm creating a path that's following the edges of the bag. When you create paths, try to create as few
of points as possible. When you click on the starting point, you
will close the path. You can then click within the path and drag
to create a curve, and you can move it around by using the direct selection tool. Click on a point, and drag it to match the
edge of the object. When you have matched the edges of your object,
what you need to do is click on the layer and hold Ctrl on Windows, that's Command on
the Mac, and click on the layer mask icon to create a Vector Mask. This is a mask based on a vector. By the way, if when you create your mask,
you get the opposite effect, make sure that you come into the options bar and change the
option on this drop-down to "combine shapes." That way, you remove the background instead
of removing the object that you've selected. This path is not perfect. We still need to make a hole on the handle,
and we'll use the pen tool for that. And once again, just click on the corners. When you click, you could also drag to get
a curve. So I would just get a slight curve here. Click here, and drag just to follow
the edges of the bag. So you can do that, as well. Remember, you can use the direct selection
tool to edit the path. With the tool selected, you can hold Alt,
Option on the Mac, and click-and-drag on this handle to move it independently from the second
handle. That way, it can match the edge better. You can also click on a point and use the
arrow keys on the keyboard to nudge those points around, and you can fine-tune their
position. So I'm just fine-tuning the position of these
points. You could also press Ctrl H, Command H on
the Mac, to hide the extras, which include the paths. That way, you could look at your Vector Mask
without the blue lines distracting you. To bring back the path, you can press Ctrl
H once again. With this center path selected, I can now
go into the drop-down and select Subtract From Shape. And that completes the mask. We have very smooth edges. Just so that you can see, I'm going to create
a solid-color fill layer. I'm going to select the light gray and press
OK and drag the color-fill layer below the bag. You will see how smooth the edges are, and
I can fine-tune the vectors just a little more to remove some of these edges. So let me select the vector. Click-and-drag on the point. And just use the arrow keys on the keyboard
to fine-tune those, and I have better edges. If I zoom in, you'll see that the edges are
very smooth. You can also click on the Vector Mask, and
in the Properties panel, use the feather slider to blur the edges if you need. I don't want to do that in this case. I want to have sharp edges. You can also reduce the density of the mask,
which is basically the opacity of the mask. So at 0%, you have no mask. At 100%, you have the mask that you created. And obviously, different levels of opacity
for that mask. So that's what density controls. So very simple. I know that you're thinking that this is a
very simple example. What if you have a more complicated object? And that's what we're going to cover in this
next example. In this example, we have a shoe. And if we use the same technique with the
pen tool, it'll take us a really long time to make a selection. But if we use Photoshop to help us, we can
speed up the process. And we can speed up the process by first creating
a regular selection with the Quick Selection tool. So I can make a bigger brush by tapping on
the right bracket key and clicking and dragging on the shoe to make a selection. If you're in Photoshop CC, there's another
method that you can use. You can simply click on Select Subject. I'll press OK. And Photoshop will use Adobe Sensei, Adobe's
artificial intelligence, to analyze the image and make a selection out of the subject of
the image, in this case, the shoe. If I press Q on the keyboard, we will enter
the Quick Mask mode, which will show us the areas that are not selected in red. So that's what the red overlay indicates,
the areas that we're not selecting. So I missed this part of the shoe, and I'm
also selecting part of the wood. So with black as my foreground color, I'm
going to select the Brush tool, set the hardness to 100%. You can tap the right bracket key to increase
the size of the brush, and then paint to create a smooth edge. Then you can paint under the shoe, as well. Now, I have to include the white on the shoe. So I'll click on this icon to set white as
my foreground color, and I'll paint on the shoe. And what I'm going to do now is press Q one
more time, and notice how the selection updates? And what I can do now is use this selection
to generate a vector path, and we can turn that path into a mask. To do so, you can click on the paths panel
and click on this icon here. When you click on that icon, Photoshop is
going to generate a vector path. But look at the problem now. This vector path has a whole bunch of points,
and you don't want these many points. You want as few points as possible, and this
has a whole bunch of points, so this is not going to work. Luckily, we can adjust how Photoshop generates
that path. So I'm going to press Ctrl Z, Command Z on
the Mac, to undo. That brings back the selection, and it removes
the vector path. And now, I can hold Alt on Windows, Option
on the Mac, and click on this icon to bring up the Make Work Path window, and I can set
the tolerance. The tolerance determines how many points your
path will have. A low tolerance will have a lot of points,
and a high tolerance will have fewer points. The highest that we can go is 10. so if I type 11 and press OK, notice that
Photoshop will tell me that we need a number between .5 and 10 in this input box. So I'll go pretty high. I'll set it to 8 and press OK. And notice that Photoshop does a very good
job in generating a path based on that selection. What I can do now is go into the layers panel,
hold Control, Command on the Mac, and click on the layer mask icon to create a Vector
Mask based on that selection. And the results are great. Notice how smooth our edges are. Once again, I'm going to create a solid fill
just so that you could see how that looks. There it is. After you create your initial mask, I would
recommend bringing down the density so that you can see the background and you can use
that as reference when you refine the mask. For example, if I zoom in, what you'll notice
is that Photoshop didn't do a good job in this area. So what I can do is select the Vector Mask,
then the path selection tool, so I can see the points. And this time, instead of using the pen tool,
I'm going to use the Curvature Pen Tool, which is brand-new in Photoshop CC. With the Curvature Pen Tool, you can make
and edit paths much easier
than you can with the pen tool. So with the Curvature Pen Tool selected, I
can just click-and-drag on a point, double-click to set a corner, so let me do it again. I've made that curve, but if I double-click
on the point with the Curvature Pen Tool, I can make a corner. See that? And now, I can just fine-tune the position
of my points by clicking and dragging on these handles like so. And again, you don't need that many points. As few as possible. Hold the space bar. Click-and-drag. And just match the edge of your shoe as best
as you can, like so. This can be a tedious process, but this is
the best way of getting smooth selections, especially on objects that are not organic. And right now, I'm just making these points,
and then using the arrow keys on the keyboard to nudge them and move them around into position. Obviously, I'm not going to spend too much
time fine-tuning every single detail, but I do want to show you a couple tricks. If I go and select the Direct Selection tool,
I can click-and-drag to select several points, then go back into the Curvature Pen Tool,
and if I press the backspace key, it deletes the points, but it doesn't break the path. I'm going to select the Direct Selection tool,
click on a point, with that point selected, I can then click on the Pen tool. And watch what happens when I hit the backspace
or delete key. See how the path was broken? See how there's no blue line in between these
two points? That's because we broke the path. So to avoid that, make sure that you have
the Curvature Pen Tool selected when you hit delete on a point, like so. And again, I'm not going to spend too much
time, but I'm just going to quickly adjust this area, like so. Obviously, in your projects, you want to spend
more time fine-tuning these smaller details, but in the tutorial, it's not really necessary
to get a perfect selection. What I'm going to do now is that we'll click
on the Hand tool so that we can see the entire image. I'm going to press Ctrl H, Command H on the
Mac, to hide the extras, and we can see our selection. Once again, I'm going to go into the properties
for the Vector Mask and increase the density to 100%. And that's how you would get smooth edges
on your masks on more complex objects. Before we move on into the next example, let
me know in the comments below if you knew that you could transform a selection into
a vector path. I'm curious to know if that's a popular technique
or not. In this example, we have this runner, and
we want to select her using the same technique that we've seen in the previous examples. So we'll do the same thing. We'll click on the Quick Selection tool, and
then click on Select Subjects, so that Adobe Sensei can analyze the image, and select whatever
it thinks the subject is. In this case, it did a decent job. Maybe not as good as the previous example. Notice that it missed part of the arm here. That's okay. We can go into the Quick Selection tool and
then decrease the brush size by tapping on the left bracket key on the keyboard, and
then holding Alt, Option on the Mac, and clicking and dragging to de-select those areas. And I'm just going to go around her body and
make sure that the main elements of her body are selected, like so. And if I select areas that I don't intend
to select, like I just did there, then hold Alt on Windows, Option on the Mac, and click-and-drag
to subtract from the selection. And then just keep adding and subtracting
to the selection accordingly. What I'm going to do now is just go in between
her feet and hold Alt and drag up to deselect those areas right in between her legs, like
so. And then make sure that I select the areas
that I want to keep. And just take your time making sure that you
select everything that should be selected. I'm missing her foot, so let me get that in
there. Subtract the area between the laces. Her heel needs to be selected, and the white
part of the shoe. Now, I'm going to go up and see what else
needs to be selected. It looks like we need to de-select the area
in between her arm and her body and select her hands. But not the areas in between her fingers,
and in this area, we can actually use the quick mask mode, but I don't think it's necessary. I think we'll be okay just with a regular
selection. We're going to turn this into a Vector Mask
in a moment, so I think this should be good enough for what we're doing. And I don't want to select her hair at this
point. We're going to worry about the hair in a different
layer. So I'm just going to de-select her hair and
just worry about the main part of her head, like so. Okay. I'm going to double-click on the Hand tool,
and it looks like we have her selected. And I'm going to do exactly the same thing. I'm going to go into the Path Panel. Click on this icon to create a vector path
based on the selection, and in this case, I think I may want just a few more points. So I'm going to undo that. Hold Alt, Option on the Mac, and click on
that icon to bring this window, and this time, I'll go with 4. I'll press OK. And that seems to work a little better. I know that I have to delete a few points,
but that's okay. So what I'm going to do now is go back into
the layers panel, hold Control, Command on the Mac, and click on this icon to create
a Vector Mask and remove the background. What I'm going to do now is zoom in to the
image and look at the vector path. Select it with the Direct Selection tool. And use the Curvature Pen Tool to adjust the
path and get a better mask. What I'm going to do now is simply click to
add points. Click-and-drag out to expand those areas,
and just add points and delete points wherever I need to. Remember the example that I showed you earlier. If you click on the Direct Selection tool,
click-and-drag to select points, and the go back into the Curvature Pen Tool and tap on
the backspace key. That's the delete key on the Mac. And you delete those points without breaking
the path, and that's what you want to do in areas like that. So what I'm going to do now is I'm simply
going to pause the video just because there is no point on you watching the tedious process
of fine-tuning points that only apply to this image. When I come back, you'll see what the final
mask looks like. Okay, I've gone ahead and fine-tuned the image,
and you can see what the path looks like. If I select the Path Selection tool and click
on it, you can see it there. I'm going to zoom in, and you can see that
we have real smooth edges on this mask. Next, I'm going to create a solid-fill layer,
and I'm just going to make it a light gray, and I'm going to bring that down under the
layer. So that the transparency checkerboard doesn't
look too distracting, and you can see what that cut-out looks like. So we were able to remove the background and
have really smooth edges. But I know that you're already thinking about
the one problem that we have: the hair. Let me show you how to fix that. If you hold Shift and click on the Vector
Mask thumbnail, you will disable the mask and see the original image. Then you can zoom into her hair. Select the lasso tool and just click-and-drag
on the edges here of her body, like so. And then, I'll go in and do a very rough selection
of the hair. Then I'm going to click on the layer thumbnail
and press Ctrl J, Command J on the Mac, and that duplicates those pixels, and it puts
them into a brand-new layer. So that's the layer that we're going to work
with for the hair. You can re-enable the Vector Mask by holding
Shift and clicking on it, and this is what we have so far. I'm going to disable these layers, then go
into the channels panel. And I'm going to click on the red, the green,
and the blue channel, and see which channel has more contrast between the foreground and
the background, and in this case, the blue channel has more contrast. So I'm going to click-and-drag it over to
the new channel icon to duplicate it. Channels work like masks. White reveals. Black conceals. So we want to reveal the hair. We want to show the hair. And we want to hide the background. So the background needs to be black, and the
hair needs to be white. That is the opposite of what we have. So we can invert the channel by pressing Ctrl
I, Command I on the Mac, and that inverts the channel. Now, we have to get the hair as close to white
as possible and the background as close to black as possible. So I'm going to go into image adjustment levels
and just make the dark pixels darker and the bright pixels brighter, and fine-tune the
contrast, and press OK. Then I'm going to click on the Burn tool,
which allows you to make pixels darker. What pixels do you want to make darker? You can select from the highlights, the midtones,
and the shadows. In this case, I want to make the shadows darker,
and the intensity of that effect, I'm going to keep low at 11%, and I'm just going to
paint on these areas to just remove that gray, like so. In some cases, you may need to use the dodge
tool, which makes pixels brighter. In this case, we want to make the highlights
brighter, and again, the exposure is the intensity of that effect. So I'm just going to quickly paint in these
areas and make them a little bit brighter, even though I don't really need to. Then, you can press Control, that's Command
on the Mac, and click on the blue copy channel thumbnail to load the white and bright pixels
as a selection. Then click on RGB and go back into the layers
panel, and in this layer, which I will call "hair" you can create a layer mask based on
the selection by simply clicking on the layer mask icon. Then, I can enable the background and the
runner, and you can see what a good job we did masking that hair. I can of course fine-tune the hair. One of the things that I could do is double-click
on the side of the layer to bring up the layer style window, and I can use a glow to cover
some of the fringing, the white outline around the hair. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select
a color that is similar to the color found in her hair, maybe one of these oranges. press OK. Change the blending mode to normal. You can see how that shows the hair more. See that? Before and after. You start seeing the strands of hair a little
bit more, which is what I want to do. And you can adjust the size and choke to control
how the glow appears on the hair. The values that you use depend on your image. You could also try changing the blending mode
to multiply to make the hair darker. Compare that with normal. I think I like multiply better, so I'll go
back to that. And it's totally up to you what adjustments
you make. You can adjust the opacity. You can adjust the color and see what color
works better for your image. Then you can press OK. I'll press OK one more time. But we have one problem. See how her neck is being affected by that
effect? Well, you can simply click-and-drag that down
below the runner layer, and that goes away. I just want to show you what the effect is
doing, that's without the effect. With the effect. If I double click on the hand tool, it'll
fit the image to the screen, and you can see the before and the after. Also, I know that the hair is not perfect. We could add some strands of hair, maybe even
bring in hair from another image and use a lot of the techniques that I use in my advanced
hair masking tutorial. All that is far beyond the scope of this tutorial,
but if you want to learn those techniques, I'll place a link down below in the description
so that you can check out my advanced hair masking tutorial. Where I'll also show you what to do with images
with busy backgrounds. So check that out right after this tutorial. And before we finish with the tutorial, just
a couple things I want to show you. The first is that we could have actually done
all of this in one single layer. So if you wanted to do all of this just on
the runner layer, we can do that. And the way that you could do it is by holding
Ctrl, Command on the Mac, and clicking on the runner Vector Mask thumbnail to load the
Vector Mask as a selection. Then holding Shift, Ctrl, Shift, command,
and clicking on the layer mask thumbnail to load the hair as a selection and add it to
the active selection. So now we have both selections as one. Then I can click on the runner layer and click
on the layer mask icon. I'll disable the hair layer, and you'll see
that we have the layer, the layer mask, and the Vector Mask. But we cannot see the hair. And the reason that we can't see the hair
is because the Vector Mask is hiding the hair. To reveal it, what you can do is click on
the Vector Mask, and then create a vector just to reveal that part of the hair. And so that we can see what we're doing, I'm
going to bring the density down so once I bring the density down. I can see the original image, which includes
the hair, and I can just start creating a vector shape around the hair, like so. I can just come in, close that up, and make
sure that you have combined shapes selected, and that brings back the hair. If I bring the density back up to 100% and
press Ctrl H, Command H on the Mac to hide the extras, you can see that we have it all
in one layer, just by using a layer mask alongside a Vector Mask. Also, I just want to point out that if you
had a Vector Mask, you wanted to convert that into a layer mask, you can right-click and
select Rasterize Vector Mask, and that makes it into a regular layer mask. Usually, you don't want to do that, but that
option is available in case you need it. I'm going to undo that change and just stick
with both a layer mask and a Vector Mask for my final image. I'm really curious to know if these techniques
are new to you, and most importantly, if they're going to help you out in your workflow. Hit that like button if you found something
useful. Also, let me know in the comments what you
thought about this technique. Remember, the comments is the only way that
I can get feedback from the videos that you watch, so I really would appreciate your thoughts
on this technique. And of course, if this your first time at
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talk to you again in the next video.
