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Lesson Info

Deleting Backgrounds with the Magic Extractor

blin moves are probably the fastest way to make collages. Yeah, really, Really fast, as you can see here. So close all these guys up, and now we're going to get into the feature. That photo shop sort of usedto have. It's called the magic extractor. And it is the best way to delete backgrounds when you've got hair or fur involved, which can be really difficult. So I'm gonna expand my project, been here again, and I'm gonna start out with this image right here. So our goal is going be to liberate super woman from her background and you'll say, Good luck. Look at all that hair so you won't believe how well this tool works. Now, I will give you a disclaimer and saying that it does require experimentation and your mileage will vary according to the level of contrast between the item you want to keep in the parts you're trying to throw away. Okay, We've got a good deal of contrast in this image. Her hair is dark. She's dressed all in dark against a lighter color background. So it's gonna do ...

a really good job. Now this it is a filter in It is destructive. So what you can do is duplicate your image layer before you do this filter because it will throw pixels away. So let's go ahead. Do that. So I'll go up to the layer menu. Choose duplicate layer, and we'll was turned off the original for safekeeping. Okay, so now we want to go up to the image menu, and we're gonna choose magic extractor, and you can think of it as extracted. Can't want to extract this person from their background or this object or whatever it ISS. This is a whole separate application or filter rather and elements, so it's kind like an apple it. So that's why it's got its own toolbar over here. And thankfully, it gives you instructions on how to use the darn thing, which is handy. So it starts out by saying click one or more times in the object you want to select, using the foreground brush tool. Boil that down to mean make scribbles on the object you want to keep. That's really all it saying here, So the tool that it wants you to use for that is already activated. When you enter this dialog box, there's no reason to click that tool again. So what, We're gonna do someone make my brush a little bit bigger, and you will need to experiment with brush size on this? I'm gonna simply make squiggle marks to touch every different shades of color possible that I want to keep in this image. Okay. Doesn't matter how big are small. Your scribble marks are. Your goal is to just brush across all the different colors that are contained in the thing you want to keep. Okay, you can use fewer scribbles, more scribbles to see what works. Best for your particular photo. The next thing you wanted to you and it's up here and Step two is switched to the background brush and marked the areas you want to lead. Now, how the heck do you remember? What's the background brush? Which one you use when and oh, my gosh, well, you can look at the icons. Just remember that the marker with the plus sign that's what you want to keep the marker with a minus sign used that one to mark the area you want to delete or subtract. It helps me to remember it that way, so click to activate the background brush and now makes scribbles across the area you want to keep and your zoom tools work within this dialog box. So I'm just making sure that I brush across all those different shades that are in that background. I want to come down here and mark all those that's gonna do a pretty good job. So now I'm gonna click the preview button. I'll zoom back in a little bit, click preview to see how good it's gonna do. And elements will think about it. Yeah. Not too shabby, huh? Yeah. Yeah. Now, admittedly, we didn't end up with all of her strains of hair, but we ended up with enough of them, so it looks riel. Okay, So if it didn't do a good job, you could click the reset button and have another go with more scribbles, different sighs, scribbles, you know, experiment when you're happy with it. Go ahead and press OK, and you will see that elements did indeed delete the background. Now, it's just a simple matter of combining those two images into the same document. Okay, so I'm gonna go ahead and click over here. Double click the the bridge photo just so I can see that one. And then I'm gonna click and drag superwoman are newly extracted superwoman into the file and using the move tool I can position her wherever I want in that cool. It's very, very cool. Can you shrink her with that? Absolutely. And glad you asked that. I'm since we do have a move. Tool activated. And I do have the show bounding box. There it is. Check Mark on and you have that option on. I get a re sizing box any time I switched to the move tool. Okay, So, for example, if I'm over here on the magnifier tool, I don't get the re sizing box. But if I switch to the move tool because that is an option of the move told, I get those re sizing handles so you can simply click and drag to make her bigger small, and you don't even have to worry about changing aspect ratio. Um, of the thing that you're re sizing, because elements automatically keeps the aspect ratio the same in photo shop CSU have to hold down the shift key or else your image will get all mopey job which is a real word in Texas wa p dash job squished or stretched water job. So once you get it just right, you can press, return or inter click the little check mark. And again, don't let these boxes and outlines throw you because they don't print. Okay, so if we were to print this image right now, that little box would would not be there. Okay, let me show you one more thing. Using our superwoman image double clicking in the project. Then they go back to that document. Let's say that you wanted to place her on top of a website. You need her to maintain her transparency. You want all of that area that we just deleted to stay deleted? If you save this file as a J pig right now, the white background will come marching right back because J pegs do not support transparency. They don't understand empty pixels. They will fill pixels, usually with white. Okay, so if you did want Teoh, save this in a manner where she is transparent around her edges. That way, when you put her on top of something else on a website or what have your even in a slide show. I use this kind of thing for my own slide shows all the time. Then she will maintain transparency. If you save her as a ping p n g. She will also maintain transparency if you save her as a gift. G I. F. Peeing is a little bit higher quality format binge if it's not a lossy compression. So let's just do that so I can say file Save as or safer whip so I can see a preview. And from the pop up menu over here in my image really is here. She's just really honking big from the file type poppet. Many over here I can choose peeing eight or Ping 24. Now what's the difference between those two? You might ask the ability to save transparent drop shadows. So if we had a drop shadow on this lady and we wanted that drop shadow, look, really when we put her on top of a slide, then we would need to choose Ping 24. If you don't have a drop, Shadow involved shoes paying 28 you'll end up with a slightly smaller file, Size said. She's paying and you can play around with the number of colors that are included in the image. If you're trying to make the file a small as possible, we could go down to probably 100 and 28 colors as opposed toe to really not seeing any difference between this version and the original. Okay, so you can play around with that. But that's exactly and make sure that transparency is turned on and it probably will be. When you choose pings, I believe that automatically turns itself on. So that's how you can save this file with transparency, but you will drive yourself insane. Trying to save it is a J pig because that white background would keep coming back over and over and over. Okay, One more small thing, because I promised it, and I think I may have forgotten Teoh to get over it. Let me get back to our fabulous San Francisco superwoman here. Let's say that we are ready to print this image, but we haven't yet cropped it. At the start of yesterday's class, we talked about cropping in guided edit mode, which is kind of like having a teacher sit right next to you and tell you what to do with all the tools. Unfortunately, when using the crop tool unguided edit mode, there is no way to cropped a specific size beyond the preset sizes. And you don't have a way to alter resolution at the time it when you're cropping. And if you know what size paper that your print is headed for. And if you know what resolution that printer ones, then you may as well do it all at one time. Okay, so we're going to grab our crop tool, and here we are in full edit mood. And if I know that I want this image to print, let's say, at a five by seven, at 240 pixels per inch, Okay, because I happen to know for my own tests that my own inkjet printer does really well, a 240 pixels branch. And again, resolution is simply measurement that controls how small or big the individual pixels in your image are. And if you zoom in to any image, eventually he will see the individual blocks of color that are pixels. Okay, so we've got the crop tool activated. You'll notice up here in the options bar, we have a wit field, Ah, height field in a resolution field. We also have a pop up menu of frequently use sizes. So let's to say that what we want is not in there. What you want to do is you want to type in the measurement along with the unit of measurement, so you must type. I end for inches, if that's what you intend. PX for pixels If that's what you intend. So if we were re sizing for the Web, I would you pixels for print. I'll use inches. So if you want a five by seven, we can type in five space. I end tab to get in the next field in Inter seven space. I in tabbed the next field. Enter your resolution here, and that's it. And now when we draw our crop box, we are restricted to exactly that size and aspect ratio. Now you'll notice that I goofed up and I flip flop my measurements. No big deal. Press escape to get out of the crop box. See these little arrows? And I believe this was a question that we got yesterday. Once my tool tip goes away. See the little arrows in between the unit of measurements that will flip flop the two measurements, which keeps you from having toe retyped. Um, it's not gonna zoom back out now. When I do that, I should get the proper aspect ratio, and you can click and drag within the crop box to move the crop box around. And, of course, if you want a crop out some of the extra bit on the edges, you can click and drag diagonally any of those corner handles. And when you get it just right, click the little green check mark. And if we want to make sure that elements did indeed change the size and resolution of what we specified, you can always check that using the image size dialogue box and the way you access that is to go up to the image menu. Choose resize image size, and I see right here that indeed, if I were to print this document that I would get a file that's exactly seven inches wide by five inches high, that's 240 pixels parent, which means the pixels are going to be too small for me to actually see. So there you have it. We've covered a bazillion things in this this short time. I hope all of you have enjoyed it. I've certainly enjoyed it. And if we've got any questions, we can, uh, answer those. Do you guys have any questions at all? You talked about flattening images. We did talk about it yesterday, and my take on flattening is there's never a need to do that, ever. Because let's say that you needed Teoh. Let's say you were going to sin this collage to maybe your camera store to be printed. Or if you're sending it to your own printer, you can print straight from elements. You just go to file print and you go from there. Okay, but if you're sending and elsewhere to print you may most likely need to save. It is the highest quality J peg possible. That's what mostly online in picks is. My lab of choice in is in Mary P. I x dot com. If I were going to export this four printing and in pics or local camera store target Costco, whatever you could choose file save as you want to choose J. Peg from the format pop up menu, click save. And then what's gonna happen actually gonna put this on the desktop? What's gonna happen is we're going to get another dialog box that asks us what quality of J Peg we want. So I'm gonna click save. Here's where I can set my compression. You want to pump this all the way up to the right? Okay. You're not gonna see if you're working from the J peg from your camera and you've been editing it in a master photo shop file format. PSD you are not gonna be able to tell a quality difference between that that j pic from your camera and the highest quality J pig here. You will not be able tell the difference. Now, if you had taken that J pic from your camera edited, it saves the day Pig edited it. Saving is a J pig, and now you're exporting a J pick from that, it's gonna look awful. But if you do J Peg J. Peg one time, which is what you need to do to have somebody else printed, especially those online places. You won't be able to tell the difference in all. But that's exactly how you do it. I have if I don't send my stuff, too in pics, if I need something really fast. Like same day, I always use my camera store Mike's camera, Big old honkin stores all across Colorado. They know what they're doing. It's they know their printers inside and out. I can send them a file and know that it's gonna be beautiful without me having toe wrestle with my own printer. Because sometimes printers could be contrary, especially when you're feeding in different sizes of papers. Things like that. You can get paper jams, and it could just be nightmarish. But I always encourage folks to use their local camera stores when you can, cause you're such a great asset. And if you don't use them that maybe they can't stay in business. So you're saying when that happens, it does flatten it. Yes, and also, if you're saving it for the Web, it turned it into a J pick and flattens it. Yes, but if you want to maintain transparency, be sure to use Ping It's of J. Peg, or you'll get a white background slapped back onto the image, and I will hear you scream all the way from Boulder only because I used to do it myself. I know what that feels like. Any other questions, the other some questions from the chat room from Studio 12 Smiles. Can you address removing glare from people's glasses? Can you do what? Net? Remove glare from people's glasses? Oh, that's a hard one. I do have a tutorial on my own website graphic reporter dot com that addresses that Basically, you have to use the clone stamp tool to recreate the part that's missing from the clerks. If you think about what Google areas is, light is the same thing with the animal bite. I you know there's no way to really correct it cause there's no information there, so you have to rebuild it and you could rebuild it using the clone source or Constand Tool. Great. Thank you. Question from your name is I should raw and primarily use light room to manage my digital images. And as you noted, you do as well. I also do most of my prose post processing in light room during your typical workflow. What are some of the specific features and reasons that would cause you to switch from processing in light room toe elements. Well, if you're using light or in great question, by the way, if you're using light room that you want to do as much as you can there because it isn't easier interface. It's all slider based, much like the quick fix mode we looked at in elements. So since he's shooting raw, he benefits from some of the extra raw processing power built into the adobe camera raw software that comes with elements as well. A slight room. Okay, so I would do everything I could in light room, so get it looking perfect. And then the only reason you'd ever need to go into elements is if you wanted to create something like this. If you want to make a collage or you want to do a partial color effect because in those programs there's really no way to create a selection of an area to tell White Room. Okay, do this thing, but only do it over here. White Room does have a selective adjustments brush that allows you to paint on exposure changes, but there you can't do partial color effects, things like that. So unless you needed to do that kind of thing. You could stay in light room the whole time. But if you want to create a collage or do partial color anything to one part of the photo besides an exposure change that you don't want to do to the wrist, then you definitely Indupa Pinto elements for that. Monica by the sea had asked, Is there an easy way to add a black border? Plain black border plane, back border? Yeah. Let me see if I can quickly find an image that that might make sense to do on. Yeah, we could do that. Very good. Okay, So I'm gonna go back to my desktop here, back to full edit, go down to the motorcycles. Radiant mask. I'll open it both these guys. Okay, So let's say, for example, we were preparing this image for a newsletter, a newspaper, or, you know, anything like that, or we just wanted to give it a nice border. You wanna double click the background layer and make it edible first, and I'm actually going to make this one smaller so that we can actually see the border. So I'm gonna click the move tool and with my show bounding box on, I'm gonna resize the image so I'm just gonna click and drag diagonally. Here's another tip for you while you're re sizing. If you want to resize all four corners of the same time, you can click and hold the option key on a Mac or Altana PC. So, for example, instead of doing this to make it the right size, you can simply hold down option on the Mac er, all its on a PC and your re sizing it kind of from the inside out. Okay, so let's say this was the right size for our photo. Now we want to add an outline, Teoh. And, as you know, an outline and elements is called a stroke. OK, so there's two ways to add it. One way is to go up under the edit menu and choose stroke selection. OK, but a faster way, I think, is to use the effects panel and with the effects panel, you get the opportunity to tweak the outline without having to undo it and recreate it. So we're gonna open the effects panel and we have to be in full edit mode for this and we're didn't go to the category of layer styles, which is the second little icon right here, and we're going to choose strokes and it doesn't really matter which one of these You can click their all presets And, you know, you already saw me at it, one of them. So just click whichever one you want, So I'm gonna double click this 1st which is gonna give me a to pixel black stroke. And that's it. Once you do that, you'll see this little effects Icahn appear to the right of that layer. If you wanted to fine tune that stroke, make it bigger, make it wider, smaller, change the color, change the opacity. Then you can double click this little icon and you'll open the style settings dialog, which allows you to tweak the size who click this little color swatch right here to bring it the color picker. Maybe come over here and grab a color that exists in the image. Whatever looks good to you not make this in a little bit bigger. And then if you want to tone it down a little bit, you can lower opacity of it. In that way, the stroke isn't permanent, so I believe. Can you do that? I think you can control. Click. Yeah. Let me collapse the effects panel stock and actually see the layers panel. Once you've added the stroke like that, if you decide you don't want it anymore, you can right click or control. Click on this FX and you'll get a menu that lets she clear the layer style. So we go right back to the way the image waas. If you would have added the outline by using the edit menu, you wouldn't have had any of that flexibility. It would have just been whatever with stroke at whatever color period you'd had to crop it out to get rid of it. E Powers says we probably don't have time to walk through it. But what is the tool that you would use for switching out heads? Oh, switching out hands. Gosh, we know I can kind of do it, but I want to do it on a portrait. I can I can I can Really, I I can do it Only had a picture that had to heads in it. Oh, there was that one of the little boys. What was that? Here it is. Okay, so I'm gonna delete the layer I used to do the color change. Now, this is gonna be quick and down and dirty an example. So we're gonna zoom in on him. And if we wanted to swap heads on these boys, what we could do is choose the selection tool that's gonna get us the farthest, the quickest. And in my opinion, that is the quick selection tool. Now, the quick selection tool is a selection by color tool, which means that when she mouse over to the image and I've got a honkin big brush go down and brush size, it's gonna elements is going to try to guess what you're selecting by the colors you paint across. Okay, so the other one in that Tulsa is the quick selection brush, which is just letting you paint on the selection. It doesn't try to guess and expand your selection in any way. Sauce switched back to the quick selection tool and the size of the area that grabbed is you paying across with this fresh is directly proportionate to the size of the brush kirsch er itself. So if we want a really big area selected weaken. Start out with a really big brush. But if we want to, let's say fine, tune the areas of the selection here we would need a teeny tiny little brush to go around the edges and fine tune it. I just kept painting with it because while you're using this brush, we make it bigger so you can see it has a plus sign inside of it, which means it's an add to selection mode, so you have to physically change it to subtract from selection mode. For example, If I painted over here and I didn't want to include that area in back in, then I could put the brush and subtract from selection mood, either by clicking this little button in the options bar here, we owe away this little button right here. See, it's the brush purser, but with the minus sign or more easily, you can put the brush in subtract mode by holding down option on a Mac or alter on the PC, and then you can paint back over that area. So if I were doing this for real, I would create this selection. I might bring up the refined edge dialogue box to smooth its edges. Maybe contract, er, expand the selection as I needed to to make it a little bit more tight. It's been more time with it that we're trying to do it quickly. Here, press. Okay. Now, to keep from completely screwing up your original, you want Teoh, jump this head up onto its own layer and I say jump because that's the keyboard shortcut. Command or control J. Okay, that will take the selected area and pop it up on its own layer. So now we have ahead on a single later. Now it's just a matter of using the move tool to scooted over in the course fever for real. You know you to really make sure that it looked fine. You might go in in the race. Uh, this little bit right here. So that's how I would do that. And again. Great for family reunions, breakups, divorces,