Sometimes you have a great photo … except you want a different background. Maybe you have the ideal profile picture, but you were at a big party. Maybe you want a better sky for a landscape photo.
I’m going to call this an “intermediate” tutorial. This means that, if you’re just starting out in Photoshop, you will want to be very patient with this. You may have to look up some terminology along the way, but I’ll try to go easy on you.
I’d be the last person to tell you that this is “easy.” I know that none of this stuff is easy, till you know how to do it, at least. But this process of taking out a background may make you want to just go and retake the photo.
But sometimes we can’t do that! So here we go.
For this tutorial, I’m going to use a photo from my friend Pat Feinstein. While her flowers are gorgeous, let’s suppose we want a simpler background. Let’s give this a try.
You can use this photo, as long as you don’t sell it, or you can use any other photo you want. You’ll see, as we get into this, that complicated edges make things more difficult.
With anything in Photoshop, there are at least three ways to proceed. I’m going to do this with masking.
Open your photo in PS. Save your file to a place you can find it.
Begin by dragging your Background layer (the photo) to your New Layer icon. This will enable you to add a mask to it!
Ctrl-click the New Layer icon to add a New Layer below the photo layer. Label this empty layer “Background.” Fill this layer with a color that contrasts sharply with every part of your photo that you intend to keep. I’m going to use plum for mine. We will be able to change this background to whatever you want, later. Ah, the magic of layers!
Click your photo layer to make it active.
Now click the Add Layer Mask button at the bottom of the Layers Palette. You’ll see a tiny white mask appear beside your photo layer thumbnail!
What you’re going to do now is to paint the mask black where you want the photo to disappear — the background.
Click the mask in the Layers Palette to make it active. Then use your painting tools, which can include selection and filling, brushes, or even unexpected tools like gradients!
In this screenshot, I’ve used a crude selection made with the Lasso and filled my mask with black.
Ctrl-S to Save. Do this every time you do something that looks good.
Now you’re going to use more precision. Choose a hard round brush and black for your foreground color. With your mask still active, paint around your image’s desired edges, making your undesired background gradually disappear.
Tip: Use your [ and ] keys to make your brush smaller or larger. Shift-[ and Shift-] will make your brush softer or harder.
Tip: Zoom as needed. Ctrl-Space and Alt-Space will zoom you in and out easily as you work.
Yes, do Zoom! And make that brush tiny for the narrow places. Here, I used a 1-pixel brush to get down into the crevices.
Tip: If you make a mistake and click your brush down, erasing the wrong part, don’t panic. Type X and it’ll change your color from black to white. Painting white over that blunder takes it away. Type x again to return to black.
And ultimately, this is my result. Zoom back in and touch up as necessary at this point.
But this is still a working background. I chose the solid plum just to make my work easier. So I will still have to try this against the background I want.
Keeping the working background, let’s make a New Layer between the two we have: With the Photo layer chosen, hold Ctrl and click the New Layer icon. Label this layer. I chose the clever title “background” for mine.
Ctrl-S.
Play around with different backgrounds. My idea here is something more simple, more artistic.
But we need to keep it real. Glass of all sorts provides us with challenges in image-editing. This beautiful glass vase is no exception! Because we can see shades of the old background in the vase, we must fix that.
To take that color out of the vase, I added a Hue-Saturation Adjustment Layer, by clicking the Add Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers Palette. I chose Hue/Saturation and dragged Saturation nearly to 0.
But this desaturates everything! Buzz! Because I wanted to desaturate just the vase, I clicked the mask for the Adjustment Layer and filled it with black, hiding the adjustment. Then, using my paintbrush and white, I painted the vase, leaving the rest in beautiful color.
I also put in a shadow, using a soft brush, black, and a flow of 25%.
Here’s a pretty & dramatic effect.
Ok, so I hope you had fun with this tutorial!