Simplify Your Backgrounds in Photoshop

in this tutorial we are going to take this photo and we're going to remove that dark distracting area in the background smooth things out a little bit and turn it into this photo as you know if you've been using photoshop for any amount of time there is a thousand different ways to do 10 000 different things and removing distractions is one of those areas there are so many powerful distraction removal tools inside of photoshop and i i recommend getting to know them as well as you can because there's some amazing things you can do with them but at the same time sometimes there can be a very simple process of an easy selection of an area and using one area of the photo to patch another area of the photo that can work out really well and sometimes it's a combination of all of them so let's go ahead and dive into the tutorial here and i'll show you a concept that i use all the time especially on my wildly photos on the backgrounds in those photos this is a technique that i use quite a bit now i'm in photoshop at this point you would have done all of your raw edits up until now okay so whether it's lightroom or camera whatever you're doing before you get into photoshop you would have done all that for those of you wondering well you know i wish lightroom would include some better cloning and healing they could but i i wasn't happy with it when it came to the healing i tried to do some healing brush adjustments up here and i just wasn't happy with the splotchiness of it okay so for me even having cloning and healing wasn't gonna work the way that i wanted to in this photo just so you know i also did go down the path of making a selection like so and going to content aware phil in photoshop which is excellent again it just it it took me it took me too long to get this to what i needed to so by the time i did all that work i found it easier just to take a just a lasso tool just a quick selection tool here and i found it easy just to make a lasso selection of a good part of the foreground okay so kind of along the lines of what i'm doing here so something along something right there um what i did from here is i just press command or control j to make a copy of it so now i have that whole section on its own layer and then i went into edit free transform okay and then i'm just going to expand it and you can hold down the shift key and that'll let you you know unconstrain it it's going to be constrained to the original proportions but i'm going to move it up and i'm going to hold down shift and slide it over something right around there i can even rotate it around a little bit to help fill in some of those areas so something right around there i'm not too worried that i'm not covering that up because i'm going to show you how i would clean it up in just a second here so i'll go ahead and i'll commit that transformation and then from there i'm going to add a layer mask to this layer so we'll just go down to the bottom of the layers panel click on the layer mask icon here and since the layer mask is white the only thing i can do to affect the layer mask is paint with black on it so i'm going to press b for my brush tool set my foreground color right below at the bottom here to black and hit the right bracket key and the key to this is using a pretty large feathered brush so when you look at my brush settings you can see the size is pretty large and the hardness is all the way down to zero so that is a very soft brush because it's it doesn't have a hard edge to it again i'm even going to go larger on the brush size here and i use the brush edge a lot that's how i get a lot of these changes that i make to fade in well is not to just go over and brush like that but instead use the edge of the brush because the edge of the brush since especially since you're using a feathered brush the edge of the brush is just going to have more of a softer type of a feel to it so i'm just going to paint away that nice hard seam that we see through there all right i'm gonna get it away from most of the the bird as well and then what i'll do is zoom in on it and get myself to a point where i can use a smaller brush so i'll just hit the left bracket key use a smaller brush and go paint away then use an even smaller brush paint away left bracket key even smaller i'll just keep painting more and more away as i get and as i as i as i make that brush smaller i'm going closer and closer to the edge since this is a soft blurry background you would never notice the difference in what we're doing here even though i'm not i don't have a perfectly selected edge i don't need it because that background is so soft okay if this were a harder more cluttered background this technique wouldn't work as well okay so get back out to full view here so that's looking pretty good left side looks good the right side not perfect could we have gotten there by manipulating that that large patch that we created possibly but it's also just as easy i can make a new layer now i can go over to my healing brush because i've given my healing brush a lot more area to work with when i had this my healing brush was lacking in an area to sample okay but now that i have a nice big open even area with this now i've got a lot larger area to sample i can hold down option or alt with the healing brush not the spot healing brush so with the healing brush i can option or alt click to sample okay and then i can come up here and just paint in those areas okay same thing i might even sample down here and paint in that little darker spot that we saw over there but something along those lines and you can see it just does a nice job of smoothing that out you can see that's what we started with that's what we finished up with so i just made that background a little bit more even instead of having that dark area at the top now is a perfect time for a very very quick word from our sponsor which is always me i have a course on wildlife editing secrets so if you like what you saw here my course dives way deeper into everything about removing distractions in your wildlife photos working with light working with skies if you think about it a wildlife photo is taken outdoors we have so many tutorials on how to edit landscape photos and in a way a wildly photo sometimes even harder because we get even less control not only do we have no control over the light but now we're also incorporating action and high iso and all those different topics into it so i do hope you can swing by the website check out that course if you are interested in wildlife photography now this is another common one that i come into especially with some horizon lines and whatnot so what's happening here is there's there's a subject that's in front of water but this water that we're looking at is actually only a tide pool okay so what you're seeing behind it is more sand i'm down low to the ground you're seeing this tide pool and then there's more sand in the background and i don't like that i want it to be all one consistent color of course again i could go in here and i could crop in on the photo and do something along those lines to me it's getting a little bit tight up at the top there so i wanted a little bit more space so i'm going to use a very similar technique i'm just going to use the rectangular selection tool here i'm going to make a rectangular strip selection right along those lines here not going to worry too much about the top because the top is going to go away so i'm going to leave some space i'm not going to bring it all the way down to the bird because this time i'm going to go to select modify feather i'm going to feather that by about 25 pixels which is going to soften the selection edge and then i just pick up where i did before press command or control j and now i have a copy of that strip on its own layer here and now i can just take my move tool move it up a little bit maybe right around there i know there's a little seam there we're going to take care of that but that just moves it up a little bit i can also go into free transform honestly i don't think i would need to in this case i'd be okay cropping that out but if i did if i needed a little bit more canvas space up there i could go up there to edit free transform hold down my shift key and i can stretch that a little bit again depending on the background you may be successful in stretching it you may not be successful in stretching it so you just have to play around with a little bit but there's nothing saying that number one i can't go down in here and maybe crop in a little tighter on this again i didn't want to crop all the way down i wanted to leave enough space up there but something along those lines and then just like before i can add a new layer go over here to my healing brush hold down option or alt and that will sample and then paint and my mode right now is set to replace replace is going to be good for hard edges it actually works better in normal mode when you've got soft areas like this which is what we're talking about in our backgrounds uh and especially in this case so i'm going to option or alt click and now i'm just going to paint along some of these areas you can see it picked up some other areas so our optional i'll click over here and go and paint that option or i'll click again paint and between you know working a little bit of your healing brush and between option or all clicking a few times you should be able to do a nice job of getting rid of some of that seam that we saw in the background there and you can always experiment a little bit with opacity but really the main point here was con you know all of the distraction removal tools can be amazing but sometimes they don't do what you want them to do and in that case just using a very simple technique of patching one area with another area can work out really well i know i did mention content aware phil earlier in the video i've got another video you might want to check out that will show you two different ways to use content aware fill one of them pretty simple and very quick one of them is a little bit more advanced and you can see which one fits into your workflow

Channel: Matt Kloskowski

Views: 11,892

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Id: 6eHEzdNgrtU

Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 08 2021