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The Easiest Way in the World to Mask a Person in Adobe Photoshop

hi everyone. It is time to get started. We're going to start with something called select subject. It is an amazing tool. If you've ever spent long hours masking our people, this might make you cry. But don't worry, it's new for Photoshop. I can show it to you here in about two seconds. Select subject. It creates a selection and you add a mask. Is it that easy? Yes. Some of the time. So let's take this super amazing. Easy to use tool. Run it through its paces, see what works easily. What takes a little bit more work. And if you've ever had to mask had a person get ready for your life to be changed. Let's jump in now. All right to get started. Let's go to file. Let's go to open and in your exercise files there is a folder called 02 selections and masking. Let's open up five files. Okay. I want select subject 1234 and five. So select subject open all five of those. Basically what I've tried to do is this first one here, subject one is pretty easy to do and they slowly get harder and hard...

er because often you see tutorials online and you're like, yeah, use this tool and it's amazing and you know it works perfect. Then you go and you and you're like, am I doing it wrong or is it too good to be true. So often with anything in Photoshop. Um it works perfect in the perfect situation and I will show you what happens when it doesn't and how to fix it. So we can become professionals and realistic professionals. So let's start with subject one. The other thing to note is if you go to select and this subject is not there. It means you've probably got an older version of Photoshop. Unfortunately. Sad face. This came out in Photoshop 2018. So if you can early version, sorry, it's not going to work. But for the people that do have an up to date version prepare for amazing Nous. There's a feature it came out. It's under the radar. I bet you don't even know it exists. It's got a terrible name. Not a terrible name, but it should have an exclamation mark or some sort of flame emoji next to it because it's that good. Start talking down and start using it. Just click on it. It's pretty easy Kick back, relax. Wait for your machine to do it depending on how big the images look at this election now, don't worry, it's not absolutely 100% perfect. It gets you 80% of the way there. Let's look at the selection by adding a layer mask, click on that. You can see there's a few issues going on that we can fix up reasonably easy using one of the other cool new tools called selective mask. But it's pretty amazing how it uses something called adobe sensei, which is adobes artificial intelligence machine learning, I don't really know which of those. It is it's fancy though. It looks at lots of other images online and tries to calculate a selection based on kind of past images to be honest. I don't know how it works but I do know how to fix our selection because there's a few little bits that are just you can see around the bed there sometimes it's just perfect. I found one that was kind of half good. It's done a pretty good job. So to fix it up, what we're going to do is just make sure your mask is selected over here. Okay, so not the image, click the mask, then click on select the mask. Another really cool feature at the top here. Yours is probably set to onion skin. Let's go against on black. It's going to give us a really good contrast between the background and the model. Okay. And I've got my opacity right up. If yours is not now in these features here, yours might be all twirled up nice and pretty like that. Okay, there is no like the exact thing that I use every time there is a lot of playing. So you might spend like we spend like absolutely like three seconds doing the initial mask but you might spend another minute or two dragging these sliders up and down to see what it does. It detection is going to work reasonably well in this one because I've practiced basically what it does, it just gives you a kind of a fluffy edge for it to do some more calculations then. Smart radius on smart radius off. Don't worry too much about what smart radius does do, do it on and off. Just see does it make it better in my case? No does it make it worse? I think I like it on leaves a bit more detail here. Close up edge detection. Let's go to global refinements, smoothing it out. It probably needs a little bit, there's a few bits that are bit jagged over here and if you're like did I make it better or worse? Um See up here it says show original. Turn that on. Turn that off. We made it a load better. Okay so Peaky you can just talk with it on your keyboard, see the everything in the brackets there. P on P. Off. Alright further I never use you might have an experiment with it and you might love it the same with contrast shift edge. I use a bit just to kind of tuck it in a little bit. There's a bit of ghosting around the outside so how much now shift edge and this one down here called decontaminate colors. I kind of fight between. Sometimes I use this sometimes I use this one let's turn on decontaminate colors. The show, have a look at the hair along the top. So off on it just kind of helps extract the image from the background. So sometimes it's shifting the edge in a little bit or decontaminate colors in this case. I'm doing a bit of both. Let's go back out, it's looking pretty good. There are some manual touch ups I need to do okay, like there's a bit of a shoulder missing. So what we're going to use is this option here? Okay, the third option down the brush tool, this is basically I'm just going to click and drag it just kind of adds the background back in in one big foul swoop because this thing is doing so many calculations over here. My drag is taking forever to kind of populate so I'm going to undo that I'm gonna zoom in, move down and I'm just gonna paint in with my paintbrush, give it a second. So I'm just going to paint in some of the kind of poorer areas, it's all looking good. There's a few bits of ears that I might touch up. So with that natural okay, it just paints things back in and undo that if you hold down the key on a Pc or the option key on a Mac. It's really hard to see her here on the screen but there's a little plus that turns into a minus. So I'm just going to talk about that a little bit off from his ear that probably needs a couple of clicks, fix up the bed there, you can see it's always calculating that's why it's a little bit hard in this area. Sorry, this mask and select program to be very quick. It depends on how fast your computer is, how big the images, how much of these dials you've messed around with. I'm happy enough with it. Like it's a pretty good mask, right? It really depends on its final position. I'm gonna put mine on the brickwork, which is subject five and it's going to be pretty forgiving. So let's click OK. What you'll notice is if you turn on decontaminate colors, that last little option instead of updating your current layer mask, it will create its own one. So I want to move it to this last half here and grab my move tool, click, hold, drag, drag, drag, drag, drag, holding the tab and then drag it back down and pretty awesome mask. Cool. Huh? Let's look at a few more examples and go a bit deeper with this kind of model selection. So I'm at select subject to just do the same thing. Let's go to select. Let's go to subject kick back and relax and be amazed. This one here is a lot different because there's a lot more kind of like fine here, which is always a problem when you're selecting models even so it's done a pretty amazing job. But there's a little bit of stuff here where the color is. Jack. It's very similar to the background, but let's just apply the mask and see where we're at now. You might decide actually. That's it. That's good enough for me. I am out of here. It's a pretty amazing tool. Well done Photoshop software engineers. But let's go into it a little bit more detail so make sure you've got your mask selected and let's go to select a mask you can see against black. There's some issues. Now if in the last image we had a pretty consistent line around the outside. The guy had a nice clean edge and not frizzy hair like this person, nice, easy to mask here. This person not so easy. I find this better as a two step process. You've got global controls that does every single edge here and then you can use your brushes to do little bits. So I find I get the big global stuff done first and then come back into here to do things like hair. So in here there's a bit of experimenting and I'm just looking at some of these edges like here we go, we'll use this bit here. So radius, drag it up, I'm happy with it. It's getting better. Remember P on your keyboard? I think I liked it better before. I think it needs a little bit of smoothing, there's too many like jagged bits. I'm just going to smooth it out a little bit. There you go. Is that gonna look nice radius, There are no settings specific. It's just it depends on your image, it depends the, look I'm looking for. I think that's a pretty good one. So Peaky tap it on, tap it off, ignore the hair, but look at the edges of the jackets, done a whole lot better. Great. So I've finished that now. I'm going to click OK? Because now I want to go back into it. So the same thing again, select a mask and work on just this, because these are all reset back to zero. If you don't you start using this tool here, there are redefined edge tool. It just becomes a bit messy. It's all trying to do this. Lots of things at the same time, so they're still here brilliant. Watch this, prepare yourselves, click drag and I'm dragging and you're like, oh, it's okay, not bad. Wait, wait for it when I let go magic. Some amazingly selected here. There's a little bit of ghosting around that which we can fix, but you can see all this hair that doesn't exist and it magically does watch this click and drag so good. And what I might do is there's there's a couple of things. One last thing his eyebrows need just a tiny bit of work. Okay, what do I do is smaller, brush size and just kind of work them around here and there's this bit in here. Will the refine edge work on it? Oh, it did. I thought I was gonna have to jump to this plain old paintbrush, but you impressed me more cool from here on in. uh like it depends on where you're using it. Again, If against black, you're gonna have to spend a bit more time in here. I want to touch on decontaminate colors, nah, it's not for me, if you ever turn that on, it's going to create this new layer with mask. Want to go back to just updating my layer mask please? Rather than a whole new layer click. Ok, I am. How happy am I with it? I'm going to copy and paste it onto here and check it. Let's turn you off. Good bye winky man back to subject to and instead of dragging it, People hate this. I hate it. It's a pain doing it that way. I'm just going to show you another way because we're here for some advanced tips, right? So right click layer zero, you might already know this way. I'm gonna duplicate layer and it will allow you to put it on anything that's open and there's our select subject. Five. Okay. And then jump to select five and there he is. The cool thing about he comes with his layer mask, which is handy. It's a bit small for this image and the top of its clipped, but you get the idea right? And look at the hair, look at the hair selection. Also good eyebrows selection, 100% eyebrows selection. So with a bit of practice if this is something you're doing regularly, you can imagine how fast you can make this, we've been learning it together? I've been teaching you. It's only taken a couple of minutes. Alright, let's turn this fellow off and get to our subject three. Alright, so this guy has some issues or not issues. Let's have a look. Let's go to select and go to subject. I want to show you what ends up happening. Okay. It's gonna miss bits is what it's gonna do. You can see there's a bit on the elbow down here that just doesn't match up. There's a bit that it hasn't got there. That's okay. It's done a pretty good job. It's starting to stretch up these things and that's what's the problem in this one. Is that the background has all these kind of streaks heading up through the wood. Okay. They are going to cause problems when we try and fix it up. So yeah, we'll just go a little bit further with this third option. With a few extra issues because the first two are pretty easy. Still pretty amazing. Let's click on our layer mask again, you might decide job done with it selected though. We're going to go to select and mask and yeah, there's a few little issues. Can we fix this up globally? It's mainly just the hair, the actual sides of him look. Okay, maybe let's do a little bit of smoothing just to kind of even out some of that. Remember the peaky on and off this bit here. I could use my refine edge brush. Let's go here and let's try and drag across this. This is where we'll find it's kind of working but kind of not, it's because if I it's because there's a big lump of wood, dark wood running up here so it really wants to kind of reach into their rather than have a nice crisp edge. So to get rid of things like that, you're actually going to have to do some actual physical painting using the brush tool. So I got the brush tool but I want to use minus I'm just gonna manually tweak this out. The cool thing about using the brush tool and using these settings is that you're brushing but it's also applying this kind of smoothing to it as well. There's a bit down here that we need to get rid of and that refine edge brush is never going to work. So we're gonna tidy these up manually, brush sizes. Why doesn't it work? Because I've tried it and I couldn't make it work. There is just times where you're going to have to get in there with a teeny tiny paintbrush as long as you're inside select and mask and you have made some of these adjustments like smooth while you are going it's adjusting. It can slow your computer down a little bit though so you goodbye. Cool. So I've done the edges. Now I want to do the hair and what I like to do instead of going in and doing the edges of the hair. Now I have to click OK and come back in. Why? Because it's trying to do that smoothing all the time, wearing using my refine edge brush and it's kind of they're kind of fighting with each other and I don't like that. I find it doesn't give me a nice result. So click OK. And then just go straight back in and everything set back to zero C smoothing. Is it zero? Now I get to go to refine edge tool, How big is my brush that works for me? Let's have a little look, I'm just gonna rub across his beard. It's quite intimate here with the man's beard, lovely to It's all about the combination of tools in Photoshop once you get to kind of an advanced level rights knowing which tools to use, which is the hardest thing and that's why I'm here to show you but it's also combining them. Now, can you see here this is a bit of a problem because there is a streak of wood that runs up there. Okay. And that's what's giving us our problems here. So what we're going to have to do is just get in super tiny, this is the way to get around these kind of issues. Okay, so getting super tiny, I'm holding down the key on a pc. When I say get in super tiny, I said get in nice and close. Okay. And I'm going to hold down the option key on my MAC. Ok on a pc and just get rid of these. Okay, even smaller brush and you can find you can kind of work it back in and back out. So just small little parts here we go. Peaky before after. Mm hmm. Working around it looks good. I'm not sure why the beard seems more personal. The man is here. I'm sure I could trimming his beard. You don't need to know this. All right now the air here. I am reluctant to hit it with this tool because it'll kind of make his ear or wishy washy. I know it's a nice solid part of skin. So I'm going to go to my brush tool and just you use my minus. Okay. Make it a bit bigger. Holding on the minus key or the old key on my Sorry, the option key on my MAC. The old key on my pc. I'm just going to go around here and just manually tidy it up. Alright, my friends, you're looking handsome. Let's click OK. Cool. Mask. Let's move it to this other document and I'm going to share with you one last kind of moving it to another document trick. Okay, so we've done the drag. We've done the duplicate. There's an old but new updated feature copy and paste. The reason you probably don't use copy and paste is in the past. You went select or copy paste and it only brought through either the image or the mask. You can see it here. Didn't bring in the whole little group but that's being fixed by adobe. So instead of doing like a select all and copy just go to so that this layer selected, got the word that that that layer selected there. Just go to copy. You can use your shortcut. Okay, command Z on a Mac and then go to here and get a paste and magic Photoshop has fixed it and brings through the mask and the image. So no more drag drag drag into the tab. You've got an older version of Photoshop. You still have to do it but 2000 and 18 on you can just go command C command V brings through things like Beverly and bosses and drop shadows and all sorts of cool stuff. Now, just select the layers you want, copy it paste, it brings everything through. Alright, let's look at our last one and this is the hardest of them all. Okay. It's still pretty amazing. It's gonna slipped subject. There's just a lot of work to do this one. I want to show you what I would do here but there is just some manual labor. It's done a pretty good job for most of it. I'm going to add a layer mask. Now that's not working right? It's got a lot of it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to instead of going in and trying to fix it all in the member of the selected masks, which we've done. We're going to utilize the quick selection tool. Now, if you are old school Photoshop and you're like magic one tool, quick selection tool, we don't use them because they're terrible. It is amazing quick selection tool. Okay, I'm going to go through to a couple of bits, first of all, I don't need any of this. So what I might do is actually just start with my rectangle marquee tool, hold down the option key on my Mac on a pc and drag a box around it to say I do not want any of that if you're like me and you're like, I wonder what's still selected. Probably an easy way just to toggle that button. Okay, just kind of makes everything red to show you what you've got selected and what you don't and toggle it off. Alright, so back to our quick selection tool. Turn on, auto enhance it makes it better. I'm not sure why it would not be on. Okay, I'm going to zoom in and I find this is a good way to get kind of closer to where you need to be to do the final adjustments in the selected masks. So I'm gonna add ad quick selection tool is pretty amazing itself learns as you go so you'll find your initial selections can be okay but as you go along, it's not actually just clicking on here. It's actually going back and looking at the rest of the selection and making adjustments because it knows more. It's smart. You can see there, it just gets better and better as it learns what I want and what I don't want. Just clicking and dragging down here, doing a bit of a loop around here. Let's grab too much in there. Now I find as well if I did a big drag there, it kind of went, it started spreading out too much so I'm going to go, I'm going to step backwards so it's step backwards a bunch of times. Step backwards and using that shortcut. Okay, just clicking once and once is actually probably a nicer way of using it. And I went and did it anyway. Go away. You this to me. I'm holding down the option key on my Mac to remove from this election. Okay. So naturally it wants to add to the selection but you can hold down the option key on a Mac or a PC to remove the from the selection. Get rid of stuff if you get lost in here. Remember just tap on this again, the quick selection only use that for that to make it red. I don't use that tool anymore. It was cool. You can see here blue and blue. It's still, it's pretty amazing how good it gets. There's probably going to be some issues with the shoelace. There's definitely some issues with the shoot down here and for the moment I'm going to ignore the shoelace just otherwise you'll be watching me forever. I'm just giving it a bit of a once over, looking around, looking around anything that I do, I don't want, it's a little bit in here. What I'm going to do is get the editor speed up this last little bit because it's just me being probably a little bit pedantic. So Cynthia. All right, you're back and yeah, so a little bit more, a lot more work but still got a lot of that. Got 70% of their right and add a layer mask and I go into my selector mask and look at some global overall. Um, changes. Probably smooth a little bit just to smooth it out. A bit smart radius. It's pretty good. I'm happy enough with it. So I did retouching for a lot of years and you get like you get 100 photos of this guy. Okay. And like the settings are all the same. You're like, I have to go smoothing and shift the edge and often you get to the same point. Like you've kind of played around with it for a while down the bottom here. You can say remember settings. Every time you load this back up, it's going to remember the last thing you did, which can save yourself some time. The other thing to note is that we are in this one here. Say high quality preview is not turned on. Okay, mainly because it takes a long time to calculate and it makes your machine run really slowly. So if you're here and you're like, Oh man, it's you know, 95% there click OK. You might find that in that last little bit of processing, it finishes it all up for you so it's good. Even the hair is actually fine enough for what I want to do but now I might go back in and work on the hair. He's got a pretty easy hairstyle like mine, I'm mostly bald so I'm asking me pretty easy. I'm asking this guy small brush. Just testing here. Really? I didn't practice this, I'm just going to do I like it. I think it adds a little bit test decontaminate colors, I don't like that. And remember if you turn that on, it instantly changes actually decontaminate colors and let's lower it down a little bit. Still doing some weird stuff across here because the blue from the containers reaching around. I think I like it on but with the amount down a bit that that slider there is new as well. Well at least my version that wasn't there before. So it was either on or off what you'll notice down here, it says output to you can't go back to that original layer mask. It'll say I'll make a layer mask but it has to be a brand new layer. Why? Because it does some weird stuff first of all I don't like it, I'm probably going to go back but if you did my essential of course you'll know that if I disable this mask you'll see it doesn't weird stuff to the actual original image. That's why it leaves the original behind. If you're wondering like man it's a pain, it just creates this new layer. It's because it actually destroys the original to make this thing happen like decontaminate colors which a lot of the time is pretty amazing in this case. I don't like it. So I'm just going to go back to the original one ahead a little bit soft on the edges but I'm okay with that. Pretty cool mask. There were selected. Remember all I need to do is go command C, command V brings you the layer mask as well as the image If you're on Pc it's Control C. Control V. And this guy here is nice. Alright I hope you enjoyed that tool. It's called select subject but I hope I've made it a little bit more usable when you get results that are subpar. You can fix a lot of it in select and mask and if you've got big chunks that are missing, you can use that quick selection tool, there's a combo deal Alright handsome men Sure why I ended up with all guys in this one. All looking great looking great masks. I will see you in the next video for a little bit of project work.