Lessons

Lesson Info

Changing the Background

But let's move on to other things because so far we've been using selected mask. Wait too much. Fine, let's do something else. Let's see. I'm gonna take this and I want to put it on a new background. Let's make our new background. First. I'll go to the bottom, my Layers panel click on the Adjustment Layer icon, and that's where I find a choice called Grady Int and with radiant Aiken choose from this little pop up. I'll choose this Grady int, and that's gonna be my new background. It's needed something. I want to put that underneath. So remember the way I created. As I went down here to the layer menu into this little half black and half way circle, it was called Grady in. In order to put it underneath. I need to unlock this bottom layer because when that Locke symbols turn on, I can't put anything under it. Then I'll drag it under. All right, now let's work with this. All right, let's figure out, how could we get rid of all that stuff? Well, I'm gonna go to the eraser tool, and that's ...

what I'm going to use now. You might think the eraser tool would take you forever to get rid of the background on this, but doesn't have to. If you click and hold on the eraser, there are actually three tools in the same slot, one of which is called the Background Eraser. That's what I want to do on this image is the race. It's background, and I can tell I used this earlier because the brush is so huge, usually a huge brushes, helpful. And so what I'm gonna do is the background a racer. First off, let me double check that it's on default settings. Take me just a moment. If you right click on the icon that is right here for any tool you can choose Reset Tool, and that's going to get all the settings up here to their default settings. I just want to make sure it acts like yours would if you were to use the same tool. I'm gonna use a big brush, and what the background racer does is it looks at across hair that's in middle your brush, and when you click, it looks at what color that cross hair is, but what it's on top of in a deletes Onley that color from within your brush. So if I use a huge brush like this and I click when the crosshairs on the blue sky, it should delete a heck of a lot of blue sky. Now remember, I have a layer underneath it that has a great Ian. So when the sky goes away, your I'm revealing what's underneath eso it deleted a whole bunch. I'm gonna choose. Undo because you'll notice it didn't delete the sky in between those thingamajigs. Whatever they are, this is what's called Watts Tower. By the way, if I remember right it was in Los Angeles or somewhere I could be wrong. And so there's a setting up here at the top of my screen. It's called limits, and it's currently set to contiguous. Contiguous means one unbroken chunk, and that's why it deleted the sky and could not go in between those metal bars and things because it needed to delete one unbroken chunk. Dis contiguous means multiple chunks, so therefore they don't have to all connect together. When I said it to discontinuous and I click in the same area, notice it's now deleting in between all of those little openings choose. Undo. Now, also up here is a setting That's called tolerance. Intolerance means how much can it vary from the color that's underneath across here? Is it okay to delete things slightly brighter or darker? The higher the tolerance, the more it can deviate from the color underneath the cross hair, I bet to the default setting will be just fine. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna move to right about here, and I'm just gonna click my mouse. Then I'm gonna move to another area that still has blue. You know, if you can see where I am right down here, if you're looking for that hand and I'll click and then I see some blew up here. So move up to their click. I see some remnants covering up the background over here, so click a couple of times you can also click and drag with this. Here we go and I see some blue at the very bottom click. There we go. And that works when we have a solid colored sky like a blue sky. The background racer could be great, but we can't use the feature called Selected mask right now because it needs a selection and we don't have one on our screen or it means a mask. And there isn't one attached to this layer. So I want to do something to convert this into a layer mask where I can use that choice called selecting mask in case it would improve our results. So we're gonna have to get kind of tricky here first. If I knew ahead of time that what I really wanted was theory journal picture with a layer mask attached. What I would have done is before I did anything, I would have duplicated the layer so that I'd have the original still in here. And I didn't think to do that because we haven't talked about it. So here's how to cheat and act as if you duplicated the original layer before beginning. I'm gonna create a brand new empty layer, and then I'm gonna go to the edit menu and choose Phil, and I'm gonna choose a choice called history. History means fill with what my picture looked like when I first opened it. So now I got my original picture in there. Now what I'd like to do is add a layer mask to it, and I want that layer mass to reflect what's hidden on the layer that's underneath it by hide all everything except for it that represents this. Here's how I'm gonna do that. There's a trick if you go in your layers panel and you move your mouse onto the thumbnail image for a layer that has a checkerboard around it, like this one does. The checkerboard indicates what's empty. Will you hold down the command key control on Windows and click on that little picture? And if you do, it's gonna select everything that doesn't look like a checkerboard. And therefore it just selected everything that was in that layer that wasn't empty. That's command clicking on the thumbnail picture for a layer control. Click it. If I'm in Windows now, I go to the layer that's on top. I'll turn it back on. We have a selection. Let's just add a layer mask and the selection will be converted into the mask. Once I've done that, I could just throw away that middle layer. I don't need it anymore. So now we have our original picture with a mask, limiting where it shows up And now that we have a mask, if I click on the mask, we could always come up here to select unmask. It needs a selection or a mask to work on, and now it has one. I don't know if we actually need it right now, but just so you know, we could use it. Now let me show you some tricks about working with masks. I'm going to view this mask. I'll do that by holding on the option key. That's Alton Windows, and I'm going to click within the little thumbnail image that represents the mask in my layers panel. When you option click on that mask, you can view it. Well, let's zoom up on it, see if there's any issues with it in my screens, a little dirty. So it's hard for me to tell. But I think I can see an edge right here that looks kind of like a circle, like a huge circle where it's black up here and it's not quite black there. Well, let's look at a trick. If I grab my paintbrush tool and I paint with black with default settings, what's gonna happen is when I paint, I just literally pain, and that's not what I'm looking for. So here's a trick. If you change the blending mode of your paint brush tool to a choice called hard Mix, then when you paying, it's going to protect areas that are white. So when I paint anything, it's pure. White will not be changed, but things that air close to pure white do change, and I don't want them to. So I'm gonna lower the opacity of my brush at the top of my screen down to about 20%. That's low enough, so it's gonna make almost no change whatsoever to things that are close toe white. So now when I paint, I just see that I cleaned up that little part of the background. I don't if you could see it or not there, but it did, and it's hard for me to tell as far as dirt on my screen versus clean background. But then that same thing works. If I switch and I paint with white now, it's gonna protect Black. It's not gonna allow me to change areas that are black or close to black, and it's only gonna allow me to change things that are brighter. So I'm painting with white and watch. I'm gonna paint right here. Watch the background didn't change, but look at the image. It is changing that where it's white, so I might paint in there a few times to clean up those areas that were partially transparent. I could paint all the way up the tower if I need to, to kind of get those areas that are partially transparent, which are areas that have gray in them to clean up and right in here. In between, I can see where I don't have solid black. So that's where I switch to paying with black and I paint and it'll clean that up. Might have to paint twice. So that's a trick that you know only if you're good at photo shop or, you know, blending modes and other things you can dio. Now what I'm done. I change this from hard mix back to normal, and I put my opacity back to 100. Otherwise, next time I paint, it's going to really mess me up. Option. Click on the mask in my layers panel one more time toe hide the mask so you can see our end result. Let's do one more here. I'll open to images and let's remove the background on what some smoke. I'll use my move to allow clique within this image. I'll drag it up to the other one drag into. I just need to have my mouth's inside that image. And, ah, I want it to look like these guys are doing some acrobatics right around these trees. I mean, literally looping around them. So let's see. I'll put him about there. Let's start with a simple selections. I'm gonna use a selection tool that's new to photo Shop is called the Object Selection tool, and I'm just gonna draw around this to get selected. Then I'll hold down the shift key and I'll draw around the second plane or the the one plane that's here. And I want to get rid of that one little part. So hold down the option key that takes away from a selection and say, Get rid of that. Okay, so we got those little parts, but now I want to get the smoke. I'm going to do that with something called color Range. It's found under the select menu right there, but in order to use color range and add to the selection. Already half a need to hold shift shift with selections always means add. So right now, I'm saying ad using color range. Now the last time I used color range, it's remembering my settings. I'm gonna try to get it to more of its default settings. When you get color range to show up, you move your mouse on top of the image and you click on what you want to keep the color you want to keep. Then you could hold on the shift key and click on additional colors you want to keep in. What I'm trying to do is click where we have thick smoke wherever the smoke is the thickest I'm clicking, and I'm doing that in maybe five or six spots, so it sees a variety the color of the thick smoke. Then there's a fuzziness control, which means how much can I deviate from that? And I'm gonna bring it as high as it will go without showing the rest of the image. So I'm gonna back off on that until the sky is still black. I don't if you can tell, but This is a preview of our image. If I hold down the control key and see it's a miniature version of our picture. But as long as his background remains black, we should be fine. I don't care about the bottom. I'm gonna click. OK, now, we just got a selection of that smoke, so I'm going to add a layer mask and that's gonna limit what's visible. And so now we have massed are smoke, Make it so it looks like they're coming in from the top of our screen looping around there. Ah, we could improve it if we threw this into select and mask just go selected mask. And why not give, uh, either photoshopped control over in the edges? Just make sure on the second tool that's there and see if it does a better job. My painting. If it improves, go for it. Or what if the color on the edge might look better if selected mass did something about it? We'll turn on decontaminate colors and find out. Look at that made it much more vividly that color and then we could continue by painting on the layer master limit where this shows up But in general you should be seen. That selected mask is a big deal. It's what we've been using to refine anything. Anytime we have furry, fuzzy or Harry edges. When it comes to advanced masking, there's a lot of techniques that we can use. The better you get at each individual one, the better you're gonna be. But ultimately it's combining those features together. Like when I used the object selection tool to select some skydivers and then held shift to say, Add to and I used another feature on top of it. I can further improve it by sending it to select and mass. So it's not usually an individual. You know, one thing does everything. It's a matter of knowing all your options so you can combine them.