Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[♪♪] [Adobe Creative Suite]
[Podcast]
[Learn CS5]
[with your host]
[Terry White] [♪♪]
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast.
My name is Terry White, and in this episode we're going to take a look
at using the new Edge Detection features to extract an image from your background
when the background is not a simple color.
I've shown this technique before, but I get lots of questions still continuously,
"How does this work when the background is not all one color--
"not all white, not all gray, not all green?"
So I've been on tour and I've been showing this particular image.
I thought, "You know what? This might make a good podcast episode
"to kind of help people understand that yes, it does work
"when the color is not a simple, solid color."
I wish I had a more elaborate background to show you, but this is the background I have.
So let me tell you what's going on here.
I've got an image. This is an image of my friend Rita.
We can zoom in on Rita's hair, and we can see that I kind of had the fan going
when I took this picture, and hair was blowing all over.
So we've got some red, some orange, some different colors in the background,
different shades.
If we zoom around here, just different things going on in the background.
Granted, the backgrounds are different colors, but they are solid colors. But it doesn't matter.
They don't have to be the same color.
And if you had a more complex background,
it really depends on how close the background color is to the subject's color.
For example, if I'm trying to extract her black hair off a black background,
that's going to be harder.
But if I'm extracting her hair off of green, red, orange, whatever,
any other color, bricks, any other pattern,
as long as it's not the same as the product or person you're trying to extract,
then it will be a lot easier.
So that's the way it works.
The more difficult or the same they are, the harder it's going to be.
The more different or contrast they are, the easier it's going to be.
That's the way it works. So let's take a look.
I've also taken the liberty of dragging the Rita image
onto the background that I really want to composite it on.
So if you look at my Layers panel over here, I've got 2 layers,
my new background that I want it to be on and of course Rita
with her red striped cloth kind of thing going on here.
So once again, this is how the process works.
You start with a selection.
You can make your selection with any tools you want.
I like to start with Quick Select because, as the name implies, it is a Quick Select tool.
I'm using a Wacom tablet.
Of course I prefer to use a Wacom tablet when I'm in Photoshop,
but you can certainly do this with a mouse.
It just won't be as easy.
Quick Select is not the most accurate select,
so it kind of jumped up there and grabbed something else.
Don't worry about that. I'll take care of that in a moment.
I'll just go ahead and make sure I get all the areas I want
before I worry about taking out the areas I don't want.
Okay, so now I don't want this area up here,
so I'm going to hold down my Option key on the Mac or Alt key on Windows
to kind of subtract some of this area going around the hair.
And Quick Select is going to do the best it can,
but it was never designed for these soft, frizzy edges like hair.
So I can kind of get in closer, kind of get more of the hair,
but it's never going to be a great selection of hair.
It's just that the tool wasn't designed for that.
We've got an area in here.
I'm just going to make my brush smaller, hold down my Option or Alt key
to kind of subtract that.
And Quick Select, as the name implies, it gave us a quick selection of Rita.
If it did a perfect selection of the hair, we wouldn't need anything else.
But that's the whole point. It's not designed for hair.
So I'm just going to go ahead and just maybe clean that up a little bit more,
knowing that that's about as good as it's going to get with this tool.
Okay, so now that you have any selection made--
again, with any selection tool you prefer--
you'll notice that as long as you're on a selection tool,
you'll have the choice of Refine Edge,
and that's where the new magic appears in CS5.
There was a Refine Edge button in CS4, but it's totally different technology.
It's brand new technology in CS5, brand new dialog box, brand new everything.
So when I click Refine Edge in CS5,
I get the Refine Edge dialog box.
Let me just show you where it starts off.
I have the ability to look at the marching ants,
which is what we were looking at before we came into this.
A red overlay--and again, this is kind of showing me the mask I would have now
as a red overlay with the horrible selection around the hair.
We could look at it on black, which again is showing me some of the red and orange
and different colors that are blending in.
We could look at it on white--same thing. I can see areas I've missed,
areas that it did good, areas it didn't do good on.
Black and white. Again, I can see how hard edged that mask is.
I also see an area up there I'd want to fix.
And my favorite one when I've already dragged the image onto its new background
is I get to see it on layers.
I get to see it against the background that it's ultimately going to be on anyway.
So that's the one I'm going to go with.
I'm just going to click out of this, and now we see it on the existing background,
but we're in this dialog box to continue working on it.
So the next step--and again, we can just go all the way down the box here--
is the Edge Detection feature.
This is new technology inside of CS5.
As we've done different selections in all the previous versions of Photoshop,
all of the tools that we've come out with to do selections
were always targeted at one type of selection or the other.
For example, we had this great Extract Filter.
The Extract Filter was really designed for hair, soft edges,
things like fur, but not really good for hard edges.
Then we had the Quick Select that we introduced, I believe, in CS4.
Again, great for those hard edge selections.
But what we didn't have was a good way to do both at the same time,
soft edges and hard edges.
So that's what this Edge Detection will do.
We have a nice hard edge around the shoulder
but of course softer edges around the hair.
And what this will do is when I turn on Smart Radius,
nothing happens while the slider is on 0,
but if I drag this over, it will start to soften up the hair
and sharpen up the edges that it needs to keep sharp.
So I can continue to drag this over.
And, like any slider, at some point you're going to start getting too much,
you're going to start bringing in too much of the old background.
And I'll exaggerate it here.
You can see where it's starting to bring in a lot of the fuzz, which is a good thing,
but it may be bringing in too much or softening it up
as I'm starting to lose some of the shoulder in there.
So again, like any slider, you have to pick your best point of where you get the best results
for the image you're working on.
I kind of want the hair soft, but I still want the shoulders sharp.
So I'll kind of pick a midpoint there
where I'm getting the best of both worlds.
If I go back down, that looks pretty good too.
All right. So I could play with that for about 5 minutes, but I think you get the idea.
Pick a point, wherever that point is, and if you go too far
you'll definitely get the soft edges around the hair,
but then you'll start to lose the other edges that you may want.
Okay, so next, to the left of that is the Refine Radius tool.
I've shown this tool before.
This tool is designed to clean up the edges that you may have missed,
that you didn't mean to get, that the edges are colors,
like, for example, I can still see some of the red under her chin from the old background.
That's what this tool is for.
It's a good cleanup tool to kind of refine your selection.
That's why it's called Refine Radius.
And it is selected by default, so the minute I come over here,
I have a nice brush that I can work with.
I can make that brush bigger or smaller,
just like you would any other painting tool inside of Photoshop.
And you'll notice it also has a target in the middle of it.
That little plus sign is designed to target the original background.
So as I drag around, you'll start to see the original background color come in.
But what it's doing is I'm telling it that's the color I don't want.
You can bring in anything else within the radius of the brush
that's not that color.
So what I do is I end up getting more of the hair
because the hair wasn't the red that I started with,
so it starts to bring in those other colors, like the black of her hair.
So here, let's go ahead and zoom in a little on the chin.
We'll go back to the Refine Radius, and I'll just tell it
that I don't want that part of red underneath there.
The problem is--and again, this is with that radius shift here that I was doing--
I'm starting to lose too much of that shoulder, so I have to start pulling that back
to kind of sharpen that edge up.
So that's a brush or a slider that you're going to have to play with
till you get the result that you want.
If it's starting to cut in too much
because there was a black stripe, I believe, going up on one of those cloths,
so it's starting to eliminate some of the hair,
you can also do the opposite.
You can hold down the Option key and you can say, "That's the color I do want,"
and it will start to bring that color back in.
That's the part I did not want. There we go.
So you'll basically go around refining the edge of your selection
to bring in the areas or colors that you want or get rid of the ones you don't want.
So again, continue to work on that.
I could spend all day kind of just going around refining the edges,
making sure I got it, but I just wanted to point out this is how this tool works.
And as you saw when I started, I did not start with a simple background, a simple one color.
It's got multiple colors in there, so that's why it requires a little bit more refining.
Now let's go ahead and zoom out a little bit on this.
We're doing pretty good.
Let's go back into Refine Edge here,
and let's take a look at a couple more controls.
I don't often work with the Smooth, Feather, and Contrast for these type of selections,
but I do work with Shift Edge.
And this is another way of kind of tightening up that selection.
So I can expand it, have it go out and grab more. I'm exaggerating.
But if I was missing more of the background, I can get more.
If I wanted to pull it in tighter, kind of get it tighter around my subject,
then I can do that as well.
So you can use the Shift Edge to kind of tighten up that selection just a little bit
on one area or another or one direction or another.
I'm going to point out or zoom in to an area here behind the head--
let's move this over--
where we're kind of getting some of the red from that cloth that was behind her head
reflecting onto her hair.
That's what this Decontaminate Colors is for.
When you turn this on--see here, I'll turn it off.
You kind of see the red in the hair here.
When I turn it on, her hair kind of goes back to the black-gray color
or lighter color that it is.
So that's decontaminating the background color
which sometimes reflects onto your subject.
When you do a decontaminate, you automatically get the selection of
it will put all of this on a new layer with a layer mask.
But even if you didn't choose that or if you wanted to change it,
you can change it any way you want.
If I didn't choose it, I can still change it to put it on a new layer with a layer mask.
So I'm going to go ahead and say Decontaminate Colors,
and again, that's a slider.
I think the default, 50 at this point, is pretty good.
But if you need it to decontaminate more or less, you can do that.
So if I'm thinking that's desaturating that color a little bit too much,
I can back off of it or increase it if I think it wasn't enough.
And again, I think the 50 was right about right.
Okay.
If you do this a lot and these are the settings you like,
you can also say Remember Settings,
and that means that every time you come in here it will do it this way.
But for me, every image is different.
I don't always use the exact same settings, or my settings vary.
So in this case, now what?
When I click OK, the beauty of New Layer With Layer Mask
is that it will hide my original but keep it
and give me a brand new layer with an editable mask that I can now turn on, turn off,
see the mask, work with the mask, refine the mask, adjust the mask.
For example, if I didn't like some of her hair here, I can just go ahead
in this with a black paintbrush and kind of refine that hair out.
I've got my brush turned down a bit here.
Let's go ahead and refine some of that.
So I'm basically hiding it. I'm not deleting her hair, I'm just eliminating it.
That's her hair. That's the way it looked.
But now that I see it against the other background,
maybe I don't want it as messy as it was here with that windblown look.
So I can go in and adjust that mask. Okay?
So there you have it.
That's it, folks, using the new Edge Detection and Refine Radius tools inside of CS5
to remove an image from a background where the background is not all one simple, solid color.
And again, it will vary depending on the background you're working on
and how close that background color is to the subject that's against it.
Black on black or white on white or green on green
is going to be harder than black on orange or green on red or any two other colors.
And if there's a pattern in it, it should work okay.
It'll just depend on the pattern if it's not the same that's on the subject.
So with that, thanks again, folks.
Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast.
My name is Terry White. We'll catch you next time.
