Adobe Photoshop is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems, Incorporated, and I am in
no way affiliated with Adobe. Okay, so in this tutorial I'm going to show you a new
way I just learned how to actually take stuff off the background. And this is what we're
going to use for this image. And this is basically a really easy thing to do, and it's actually
pretty precise. So you get on to filter and you hit extract. As you can see, my blue is
on, and let me zoom in for you. There's something called extract. It's probably something a
lot of people don't use. But it's going to bring up this dialogue box right here. Now,
the tools that we use in this are the marker, the paint brush, the erase tool, eye dropper,
you've got the magnifying glass, and you can see on the left hand side there's a little
hand. You've got tool options--you can make the brush size bigger, you can make the highlight
a different color, you can make the fill a different color. You can click smart highlighter,
you can take that off. Extraction, texture, image. You can smooth it. You can do all sorts
of cool stuff. So what we're going to do is we're going to actually--if we start painting
right now, on the edge, you're going to see a very thick paint. As you can see right there.
Or you can hold onto command or control, and it'll come out really thin as you can see,
and that's called the smart--that's called the smart highlighter. For this image, we
can actually just probably go along it with the thick one. And you just slowly go around
it. Just like I'm doing. Slowly go around it. If you'd like to use that smart edge,
you can. Now, we can do it like right here. I can hit command and just go along the edge
just like that. Or we can just use the thicker one, and that's what I'm going to do. Just
use the thicker one. You're just going to go along what you want to be separated. So
this is kind of like using the lasso tool, but it actually give you a lot more flexibility,
as you'll see in the final product. It actually selects really, really well. You don't have
to be--you can try to be as precise as possible. And this does take a little bit of time to
do. Okay, so we've got our little selection here. Now what you want to do is take your
paint bucket and fill in the inside. And this is what you want to bring in. So we're going
to hit okay, and it's going to bring us back into Photoshop to the original strain of Photoshop.
And as you can see, if I take out the background, the bottom layer--it's going to show exactly
what we just did. And if I zoom in for you guys, you can actually see that it did a pretty
good job on the hair. I mean, more than likely if you used a lasso tool, you would not get
that preciseness on the hair. And the way we can tell is you want to click down on this
bottom layer, make a brand new layer, and fill that in completely with white. And as
you can see, the hair looks pretty good on the dog. And it actually didn't an excellent
job of selecting. But you do see a few areas down over here on the leg where it looks kind
of funky. So what you want to do is you want to click back on the background and hit your
history brush. Then you can bring back in what you want to bring in. Say for instance
the paw, and right here looks kind of weird. And certain areas that look kind of funny
you just want to bring back into color with it's actual history brush. And it actually
just helps up bring in little areas. And those funky little areas to get rid of it, you just
use the eraser tool. Just go ahead and erase all that stuff out of there. This is really
just cleaning up the image. So as you can see, we've got ourselves a clean image, looks
good all the way around, little bitty area in his ear looks kind of weird--go up here,
make sure everything looks good. And it does look good. It looks enough--clean up his foot
right there. Okay. So now we've got a dog separated from the background, and we're going
to move onto the next step.
