Background manipulation

JH
Posted By
Jon_Hoggatt
May 4, 2005
Views
259
Replies
6
Status
Closed
I was wondering if anyone had experience with manipulating the background of a photo… particularly portraits.

What I would like to do is take a portrait photo and make everything but the person black (or perhaps a textured black… maybe some swirls in it or something.) I just want it to focus on the person and nothing else essentially… almost as if they are in a big abyss with no light but what is illuminating them.

I have used the color wand and selection brushes (very zoomed in) to do manipulations like this… but it is very hard to do on some features like hair… it is very tough to change the background in little spaces between hair.

To give you an idea of manipulations I have done with the selection brush by hand, you can check out the following photo of my girlfriend.

< http://community.webshots.com/photo/331615766/331626186DKBlQ G>

I would like to take a portrait of her I have done like this and make it all black behind her. Does anyone have any ideas? Let me know.

Jon

P.S. Feel free to check out some of my other photos on that site as well and see if you have any suggestions on techniques that could help me.
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background manipulation

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WE
Wendy_E_Williams
May 4, 2005
Jon,

There are quite a few ways to do this … a couple are:

Select the person using one of the selection tools
Edit>Copy
Edit>Paste
Now they are on their own layer so you can simply put a new black background layer behind them.

or …

Use the Burn tool and darken the background … you may need to also use the paintbrush to fill in very light areas (they don’t burn in too well).

This one was done using the burn method:

< http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?pic=1h053Fgo6dc4RXwp358zBH rUROsk>

Wendy
MK
Mark_Kenwright
May 4, 2005
Hi Jon,

The great news is that there are plenty of ways to achieve things in PSE! Wendy has already suggested two that I would use. Here is a third. I don’t think any one way is best – except for the one that you feel most comfortable with.

Step 1: With the image open on screen, Go to the Layer menu, select the New Adjustment Layer sub-menu, select the Hue/Saturation command, hit ok to select the default name.

Step 2. In the dialogue box that appears, move the slider for the lightness as far left as it will go (the figure in the corresponding box will read -100. Your entire image now looks black. Click OK.

Step 3: Open up your Layers Palette if it isn’t already open (F11 toggles it on and off) and you should be able to see the new Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer that you have created in Step 2 sitting above your original image in the stack. Click on the white coloured box to the right (its called the Layer Mask Thumbnail);

Step 4: On the tool bar, make sure the default colours of black & white are visible with black set as the foreground colour and select the paintbrush tool.

Step 5: Paint over the image to reveal your girlfriend beneath! Adjust the size of the brush and zoom in close when it comes to her hair. Sorry, I don’t know of any quick way to deal with hair!

The great thing about this method is that if you make a mistake and accidentally paint over a part of the background that you didn’t wish to see you can change the foreground colour from black to white and paint over it again to conceal it.

Furthermore, in Step 3, I would knock down the opacity of the adjustment layer to something like 50% to help in identifying which parts of the image you wish to reveal before finally knocking it back up to 100% when you are happy.

Best of luck.

Mark
JH
Jon_Hoggatt
May 4, 2005
Thanks for these suggestions… I will have to try them later today to see if I get the effects I am after.

Hair can be such a pain! Especially in cropped and or zoomed images which show more detail.

Jon
KL
Katie_Lafferty
May 20, 2005
Wendy,
I cannot find the Burn Tool command. The Dodge Tool icon is there but the Burn Tool is not. Any help would be appreciated,
Katie
KL
Katie_Lafferty
May 20, 2005
found the burn tool. sorry about that!
Katie
WE
Wendy_E_Williams
May 20, 2005
Katie …

Glad you managed to find it 🙂

Wendt

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