Fine Selection/Background Retouching

Making Very Fine Selection and Retouching Portrait Backgrounds

When we shoot portraits, sometimes we end up with an undersirable background. Having a different coloured background or to superimpose your subjects picture into another background can improve the pictures. But, one of the main problems with making fine selection is right on top of your head.  Hair... Making fine selection of hair is one of the most tricky technique to master. 

If you are have a low pixel image or a starter range lens that gives soft pictures, do note that hair strands does not appear individually. Zoom in closer and you'd realise that hair strands mostly appear as clumps/or a line of grey pixels in different tones to simulate the appearance of hair. Thus editing around these "grey pixels" require special care.

Thanks to sampoerna for bringing this query up (and the model for this tutorial) here : PhotoShop Help

Here's a fine selection technique used by professional designers which you all can try out:

STEP 1 : If you have never heard of Colour Range, now is a great time to find out. It's a selection technique in which you can select a band of the same colours automatically. If you've been using the lasso tool, you would know how tedious it can get to select complex images. Well, this tool helps you to make very minute selections on your picture.

STEP 2 : Select the part of your image which you wish to edit. Here we are looking at removing the shadow from behind the model. Use the selection tool with the "+" and make your selection within the shadow areas. You may have to click a few times within different parts of the shadow to get it all selected. Don't worry about the selection made on the different parts of your subject as you won't be touching these areas for the edit. 

The fuziness slider affects how much of each colour banding selection is to be made, or in other words the fuziness of the edges. Experiment with this for different pictures. Here I am using a level of 36.

STEP 3 : Click on "OK". And you can see how the fine selection has been made. Now go to your clone stamp tool and we're gonna have a bit of fun...

STEP 4 : Begin by stamping out the shadow using source from the uncovered area of the wall behind your model. Here we concentrate on the side of the model and under her armpit. Make sure your stamp size is small enough not to affect the selected areas on the models herself.

STEP 5 : Deselect and you will see that you have effectively removed the shadow closest to your model leaving just a thin line of shadow at the edge of where it used to be.

STEP 6: And because this thin line is further away from the model's hair, you can easily clone it out!

STEP 7: And that's IT! Once you get the hang of it, you can do this easily in less than 5 minutes flat!

For the next step of steps, we are going to make a fine selection and change the background of the model.

STEP 8: Again by using Colour Range, select the background of the model. As before, click on a few areas until the entire background is selected. This time, I needed to bring the fuziness down to 20 as I wanted to keep the selection cleaner on the background.

STEP 9: Create a new layer. Funny thing is, although this layer is on top, you'll be calling it your background colour layer... hehehe...

STEP 10: Then fill it with a bright colour such as red. Don't worry, you can change this colour later.

STEP 11: Hide the original layer of your model and you can see the filled in areas in RED. This makes your work a lot easier as you can see in the next few steps.

STEP 12: Select the Eraser tool from the tool menu. Change the hardness of the Eraser's edge to 50%. This will ensure that you don't accidentally erase too much at the edge of your work area.

STEP 13: Start erasing the areas that is not part of the background! This shouldn't be too hard to do.

STEP 14: This step you can either do with or without. But you can add a tiny glow around the red area (about 2 to 3 pixel wide) just to "fuse" the new background against the your model. This is because sometimes tiny "holes" or "gaps" can appear, so this method fills in all of it. For a multi-coloured background you can use a 50% grey glow. Make sure you don't do too much of this as it will look fake if you do.

STEP 15: And that's it!

HAVE FUN EXPERIMENTING!

bY kENJI