Quick Cut Outs with Photoshop Brushes

Transcription

1 TIP SHEET #10 Quick Cut Outs with Photoshop Brushes Compositing or rather, the process of selecting and cutting out assets from one picture and realistically adding them into another is an extremely common practice in the world of Digital Photography / Digital Art. Compositing is everywhere in areas such as the Movie Industry to create elaborate and fantastic posters advertising the latest blockbuster to Photographers being asked to simple move a person from one picture to another. No matter how elaborate or not the final picture, there are essential skills that need to be mastered and none more so than making accurate selections and cut outs. Over the years Photoshop has made life considerable easier for those of us creating composites with the introduction of such tools as the Quick Selection Tool and Refine edge and more recently Select and Mask however despite these additions the skill of the retoucher is knowing how other tools can be used when others fail. In this tutorial I want to take you through a selection and cut out, but we ll make it one that could potentially be quite challenging. I ll show you how we can use a brush within Photoshop and how to make a few changes to it s behavior so that we can in fact fake the cut out and speed up the process considerably. So, let s go through the process but first of all show you why you would want to do this

2 Step 1: Quick Selection Tool Start with the Quick Selection Tool to make as accurate a selection of the mouse as you can, but don t worry too much about making it perfect. You ll likely notice that the selection process starts off well but then, when we work around areas such as the tail the selection goes off track somewhat. To bring the selection back close to the mouse and remove unwanted areas from the selection hold down the ALT/Option key whilst dragging. Step 2: Select and Mask / Refine Edge Now that we have a fairly accurate selection of our mouse, click to enter Select and Mask. Using Select and Mask though (despite being the all new singing and dancing selection method) because of the closeness in tone and contrast of the mouse to the background doesn t produce as good a result as we d like. Smart Radius and then the use of the Refine Edge Brush to pick up some of the fine hairs produces a cloudy, smudged effect going around the mouse. It s times like this we can turn to other tools within Photoshop to speed up the process and actually fake the cut out. Step 3: Layer Mask Click Cancel to exit the Refine Edge dialog box and return to the original picture of the mouse with the selection we made with the Quick Selection Tool still active. Click to add a Layer Mask and then so that we can see clearly what we are doing as we cut the mouse out, let s add a blank layer below the mouse by holding down the Command/CTRL Key and clicking on the New Layer icon at the bottom of the layers panel. Then go to EDIT > FILL and choose White from the contents drop down menu and click OK.

3 Step 4: Brush to Erase Click on the layer mask attached to the mouse layer and then choose a round, hard edged brush from the tool bar. Click on the brush options to ensure there are no settings applied to affect how the brush behaves. Then with this hard edged brush and a black foreground colour paint around the perimeter of the mouse so as to paint away part of the mouse s body/fur. (Decrease the size of the brush as you go along areas such as the tail.) Step 5: Fur Brush At the moment the cut out of the mouse doesn t look realistic however we can now use a brush that is pre installed in Photoshop to create the look of fur. Go to the Brush Preset Picker and scroll down until you see a brush that looks like a single blade of grass (number 112). Click on this brush preset and then click to open the Brush Panel. Here at the bottom of the brush panel that appears we can see a preview of what the brush will look like if used with the presets it currently has applied. We can now make changes to these settings so that the brush behaves differently.

4 Step 6: Brush Settings Brush Tip Shape we can use to change the angle that the brush is applied (this comes in very useful when painting along the contour of the mouse). Adjust Spacing so that the brush gathers tighter together as we are going to apply settings to fake fur. In the Shape Dynamics tab increase the Size Jitter to around 10% to slightly vary the size of each brush stroke that is applied. Leave Scattering at it s default and turn off Colour Dynamics and Transfer. Step 7: Paint back the Mouse With the brush settings in place, change the foreground colour to white and then with the fur brush we have just created, paint along the perimeter of the mouse to reveal what was previously hidden. However now that we are using this new brush, the parts of the mouse we painted away are now revealed as fur. As you paint around the mouse dive back into the Brush Panel to alter the Angle and also the size of the brush that is appropriate for the area you are brushing over. Once finished you can then use the Move Tool to drag the mouse off the original picture but bring with it the layer mask should you need to make any adjustments / refinements later.

5 Step 8: Save the Brush Having taken the time to create this fake Fur Brush, you ll most definitely want to save it as a preset so that you can quickly easily use it in the future without going through the previous steps each time. To do this click to open the Brush Panel and then click on the Create New Brush icon in the bottom right hand side. In the dialog box that appears give your brush an appropriate name an then click OK. From now on you ll then be able to choose this brush from the Brush Preset Picker. Note: Compositing in Grass Brushes are undoubtedly one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal in Photoshop; especially when it comes to creating composites. Again using a brush that comes pre-installed (134) we can apply our own settings to create the look of grass. In this composite of a Lioness, having made a selection and cut out using the exact same method in this tutorial, I ve then used brush 134 to hide parts of the Lioness in shape of grass so that she appears to be within the grass. CHECK OUT MY YOUTUBE PAGE FOR 100 S OF FREE TUTORIALS