Photoshop: Transparent airbrush tool?

I am trying to cut out a person from one image and paste them into another and make it look fairly believable using Photoshop CS. I have made a selection using the polygonal lasso tool and have pasted the layer onto the background. I was pretty successful at cropping the image however there are some areas that could use touching up. Is there a tool were I could airbrush "transparent paint" to get rid of the unwanted areas smoothly? Is there a better way of doing what I want to do? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Harold

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I am trying to cut out a person from one image and paste them into another and make it look fairly believable using Photoshop CS. I have made a selection using the polygonal lasso tool and have pasted the layer onto the background. I was pretty successful at cropping the image however there are some areas that could use touching up. Is there a tool were I could airbrush "transparent paint" to get rid of the unwanted areas smoothly? Is there a better way of doing what I want to do? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Harold

The closest that you can come to doing what you want is to place your additional image into a separate Layer above your "background" Layer, and make a Layer Mask via the icon on the Layer Palette. Then you make the mask active in the Channels Palette by clicking on it, and using the Airbrush Tool to paint in, or out the mask. Note that when you make the mask active, your colors will change to black/white.

This is always preferable to cutting out the image, and then trying to "cut" out its outline. The Layer Mask allows you to go back and add, or subtract whatever you need.

Depending on what you have done so far, you may want to start over, and place the person into a Layer with mask, then do the detail work on the mask.

Hunt

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I am trying to cut out a person from one image and paste them into another and make it look fairly believable using Photoshop CS. I have made a selection using the polygonal lasso tool and have pasted the layer onto the background. I was pretty successful at cropping the image however there are some areas that could use touching up. Is there a tool were I could airbrush "transparent paint" to get rid of the unwanted areas smoothly? Is there a better way of doing what I want to do? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Harold

I would suggest using a layer mask. This will create the ability to either "paint out", or "paint in" any area of your layer (using the brush tool), with differing opacities throughout the mask. Sure you can do it other ways (eraser tool is one), but the good thing about a layer mask is if you save your file as a .psd, you can come back later and adjust your mask by either revealing or hiding more of your layer.

Look in the help files, or do a Google search... I just did and came up with 98,900 results.

Good luck!

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SamMan
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wrote in news:1104281917.080940.65370
@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com:

Is
there a tool were I could airbrush "transparent paint" to get rid of the unwanted areas smoothly?

Something wrong with the eraser tool?

Eric Gill wrote:

wrote in news:1104281917.080940.65370
@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com:

Is
there a tool were I could airbrush "transparent paint" to get rid of the unwanted areas smoothly?

Something wrong with the eraser tool?

Yes a lot, it erases. :)

"Eric Gill" wrote in message

wrote in news:1104281917.080940.65370
@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com:

Is
there a tool were I could airbrush "transparent paint" to get rid of the unwanted areas smoothly?

Something wrong with the eraser tool?

It is destructive editing... once you close your image, there is no going back. A layer mask allows you to do this (days, weeks, months, years later).

--
SamMan
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As is often the case with Photoshop, there are many ways of doing this. Here are three of them:

Make sure your added person is on a separate layer above the background you're adding him/her to. For simplicity, let's call that layer "Person."

1. If the background for the Person layer is fairly even in tone, try one of the options under Layer>Matting.
--- or ---
2. A.Select>Load Selection> Person Transparency (this makes a selection of just the person), or cmd-click (PC: ctrl-click) the thumbnail for the Person layer.
B. Press Q to enter Quick Mask mode. Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur with a small radius to feather the selection.
C. Press Q again to go back to marching-ants mode, then
Select>Inverse to select the transparent background plus a few partially-transparent pixels at the edge of the person.
D. Delete to delete the fringe pixels
--- or ---
3. Set the Clone Stamp tool's blending mode to Lighten or Darken, as needed. Clone into the edge of the person at around 40-80% transparency.

Tom Nelson
Tom Nelson Photography

In article ,
wrote:

I am trying to cut out a person from one image and paste them into another and make it look fairly believable using Photoshop CS. I have made a selection using the polygonal lasso tool and have pasted the layer onto the background. I was pretty successful at cropping the image however there are some areas that could use touching up. Is there a tool were I could airbrush "transparent paint" to get rid of the unwanted areas smoothly? Is there a better way of doing what I want to do? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Harold

SamMan wrote:

"Eric Gill" wrote in message

wrote in news:1104281917.080940.65370
@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com:

Is
there a tool were I could airbrush "transparent paint" to get rid of the unwanted areas smoothly?

Something wrong with the eraser tool?

It is destructive editing... once you close your image, there is no going back. A layer mask allows you to do this (days, weeks, months, years later).

He's knows that, believe me.