Hi Everyone
With Adobe Photoshop CC, it's quite easy to cut out a person or an object from a photo to be used in another project. While it's always preferable to cut out something from a photo that isn't obscured by other objects, this isn't always possible.
Last month we demonstrated how to create a simple composite image using pre cut-out elements in Adobe Photoshop Mix. This month we will be looking at how to extract elements from their backgrounds to place them into a new scene. Photoshop Mix gives us a very simple way to do this, which is often as easy as dragging your finger over the item once.
What we’ll learn:
- Starting a new project
- Importing the images
- Using the cut out tool
- Smoothing edges
- Adding a look
Let’s get started.
1: Starting your image project
Launch Photoshop Mix. If this is the first time you’ve used it, you’ll be asked to sign in to your Creative Cloud account with your Adobe ID. If you don’t have an account, you can also choose to create one from the same screen. Once you’ve done this, you’ll be taken to the project screen, this has some built-in sample projects and is where your own projects will be displayed as you create them. Tap the plus sign in the top-right of the screen to start a new project.
Starting a new project
2: The file import screen
Photoshop Mix gives us a choice of sources to import our first image. We can open an existing photo from the camera roll, take a new photo with the phone’s camera, or download one from Creative Cloud, one of our CC libraries, Facebook or Dropbox. Tapping on one of the options opens a thumbnail view of the contents. You can also navigate through any folders and collections you may have set up. I’m browsing my camera images using On my iPhone.
3: Import the background image
Tap the chosen image to import it into the project. This may take a few moments if you’re using a cloud-based source. We’ve chosen this seascape as makes a great background for the artwork. You will notice that there are two boxes in the middle-right of the screen. These are your image layers (you can have up to 5 layers at the time of writing this). The layer highlighted blue is the current layer, which we’ve just imported. We’ll leave the background image as it is for the time being.
The imported background image
4: Add a second layer image
Now we’ll import another image element to place in our scene. To do this, tap the plus sign on the empty layer square in the Layer Panel. This will open up the file selection screen as we saw before. We’ve chosen an image of an origami boat. The new image appears centralised over the background. We can see an additional layer square has been added to the layer stack on the right.
5: Switch To Cut Out mode
The origami boat is great for our image. We will need to cut it out from its background, so as to make it fit our seascape image. Tap the Cut Out icon at the bottom of the screen, this takes us into the cut out view and initially hides other layers leaving our boat layer visible and easier to work on.
Photoshop How To Cut Out Object
Selecting the cut out tool
6: Remove the boat’s background
We will use the Smart Selection Brush here as this is very effective at taking away the unwanted background. This is found by tapping the icon at the bottom right side of the screen. We simply drag a finger over the boat to make the selection. As we do we see the background disappear, leaving the chequerboard pattern. Often this is all you will need to do, however, you may find areas that have been missed. These can be tidied up by switching to the Basic Selection Brush and painting them out manually.
The Smart Selection tool
7: Zooming into the detail
The Smart Selection tool is good but it leaves some untidy edges. We need zoom in on areas of the boat so we can see the detail. Tap and spread two fingers to enlarge the view of the boat, which really makes it easier to see the fine lines.
8: Smoothing Out the Edges
Press and hold the Feather tool at the bottom of the screen. We can increase the feather amount by dragging to the right until the edge looks smoother. In this instance we do not need a lot of feathering, A value of 1 has smoothed it out sufficiently. The bottom of the boat looks ragged, that’s ok, as this is how it would appear in the water. Tap the Tick Mark in the bottom right of the screen to apply the changes.
Feathering the edges
9: The Finishing Touches
To finish our simple scene, we will apply an overall effect using the built in Looks feature. Here we’ve applied the Twilight preset to the background image, which creates a slightly grainy, cross-processed appearance.
10: The Final Image
Here is our final image, we’ve applied the same Look preset to the paper boat as we did for the background to help it blend into the scene.
The Final Image
I hope you’ve enjoyed the tutorial and you have been inspired to go and create your own photo-montages using Photoshop Mix.
I’ll be back next month with another mobile image editing tutorial, so stay tuned!
Josephine J x
Related Articles
- 1 Cut Out an Object in Photoshop
- 2 Cut a Person Out and Paste into Another Photo in Photoshop
- 3 Copy and Paste an Image to Another Image in Photoshop
- 4 Crop an Irregular Shape in Photoshop
Whether you want to cut out a picture of your head and put it on Iron Man's body, remove an ugly background from an otherwise lovely photo of your storefront or banish your ex's face from an old picture, cutting out images in Abode Photoshop begins with a simple process. First, you must select areas of the photo with an outline, sort of like tracing. Once you select a part of the image by tracing around its shape, you can move the selected area and drag it to another part of the image or to a new photo entirely, similar to the way you'd move a paper cut-out around.
While the cloud-enabled Adobe Photoshop CC version 19.1.5 hit in June of 2018, the process of cutting out image layers has been fairly consistent since the concept of layers was introduced to the program was back in the 1990s. If you can pull it off in Photoshop CC, you should be comfortable enough to pull it off in the older versions, too.
STEP 1: Prep Your Image
Cut Out Text In Shape Photoshop
In Photoshop, open the image from which you'd like to cut an element out using the File menu or drag the image into the workspace. In the Layer menu, which is located on the right-hand side of the workspace by default, you'll see the image listed as Background. Click the lock icon to make the image work as a layer instead.
Hone in on the area of the image you'd like to focus on by scrolling the image to the general area of interest, then holding the ALT key and moving your mouse's scroll wheel forward to zoom in or backward to zoom out. Alternatively, you can just use the Zoom tool from the toolbox to zoom in or out.
STEP 2: Make the Outline
Select the lasso tool from Photoshop's toolbox menu. When you click the lasso, you'll have the option to choose the regular lasso, the polygonal lasso or the magnetic lasso – each one works a little differently, but they all let you outline a shape. Again, this is sort of like tracing around the edges of the part of the image you want to cut out.
The regular lasso works basically like Photoshop's pencil tool: just hold down your mouse's select button and drag the cursor around the image to draw your outline. Youtube ullam kollai poguthada serial. To use the polygonal lasso, you click one point on the image, drag the line to the next point, click again and repeat the process until you've created a closed outline. The magnetic lasso works similarly, but this tool automatically detects the edges of objects in the image, which may help you create a more accurate outline.
STEP 3: Cut it Out
Now that you've defined the shape you'd like to cut out of your image, you have options. If you want to remove this part of the photo entirely, just hit Delete or backspace on your keyboard to delete the selection – this leaves a blank space where the cut-out portion used to be, revealing the layer underneath the whole image.
If you'd like to cut your selection out of the image and use it elsewhere, select Cut from the Edit menu. Open the image you'd like to put your cut-out into, then select Paste from the Edit menu. Select the Move tool from the toolbox, which is the cross-shaped tool with four arrows, then click on the cut-out image with the Move tool, hold down your mouse's select button and drag the cursor to move the cut-out around. You can also use this method to move the shape to a different part of the original image.
References (4)
About the Author
As the co-founder of an LLC, the owner of a small business and a partner at an S-corporation (all working in media), Dan is no stranger to small business. As a business writer, he's contributed to publications including Chron.com, AZCentral, Fortune, GlobalPost, MSN Money, GoBankingRates, Zacks.com, The Motley Fool and more.
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