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Hey! What's up, everyone. So today I'm going to show you how to put a new background onto
an image that has relatively wispy hair.
You know—just hair flying all over the place. And I'll show you how to do so without going
to every pixel, going down to every crevice and selecting out the background.
So let's start off by getting your background image and your photo into Photoshop.
Next, we're going to select out the subject, who is in this case the *beautiful* Emma Watson
( :D ), and you can do so by hitting down W or going to your sidebar and going to your
Quick Selection Tool.
Now I know that some people, they like the Magic Wand as an auto-selector—you know,
hold down SHIFT and start clicking away like crazy, trying to get everything, but for photos
that have the extreme hues—all the different shades of color in one area—, the Magic
Wand Tool is bit too sensitive for that, so I just use the Quick Selection Tool.
Under the Quick Selection Tool, you want to make sure that you're under the "Add to Selection"
option. I think it automatically starts off with the "New Selection", but for some reason
if this toolbar isn't up here, you can just hold down SHIFT and start coloring away on
your subject.
Just get the basic outline. Get all the hair, and don't worry if it goes over and you select
some of the background.
Next, hit L or go to your sidebar and manually choose the Lasso Tool. Under the Lasso Tool,
make sure you're on the "Subtract from Selection" this time, and if this tool bar is not up
here again, hold down ALT—or OPTION if you're on a Mac—and next you want to get the big
parts—the really blatant, white parts and you want to subtract that out.
For the very best selections, though, you can, of course, scroll down to the pixel level—zoom
in—and select stuff from there, but if you don't have the time, the patience, or the
energy to go through that, this different way is a lot better.
Go to Refine Edge under the toolbar, and again if that's not there, Select -> Refine Edge.
Under Refine Edge, go ahead and check "Smart Radius".
I usually bring it to about medium... or you can move it larger... medium-ish/this sort
of range. You want to get rid of the preliminary backgrounds.
Next, I check "Decontaminate Colors" and drag that to 100%, and then, finally, finish everything
up with the Manual Enhancement Tool.
And this part, you're really just coloring all white areas. Get rid of all that background.
And you can overlap and do so over—use this tool over and over again, and try to really
get down to the nitty-gritty and get all this white stuff out.
When you think your selection is about done, go over here, make sure your Output is to
"New Layer with (Layer) Mask", mmkk.
Hit "Okay", and now you have your fairly cropped out, very, very nice picture of Emma Watson.
Drag this out, move this layer onto your Background Image. You can zoom out, go to Edit -> Transform
-> Scale.
You're going to hold down SHIFT to retain the Aspect Ratio and start scaling your picture
to whatever size you think is... good for your picture.
And... little more...
There we go.
Hit ENTER to finalize your transformation, and at this point, your picture is pretty
much done.
You can sort of blend it by going over here to your Layers Window, under Normal -> Hard
Light, where it blends it in a little bit better.
However, if your background is red or blue, the hard light doesn't work as well, so you
can—another way to do this is going to your Eyedropper, getting the color of your background,
going over here to the Brush Tool. Make sure your opacity is like 15%-10%, kind of small,
and start coloring over her skin as a way to blend it in.
I don't really color in the hair or the clothes (unless it's black and then it doesn't matter)
or her eyes because I kind of want them to stand out. But this way, it's a super light
blend, and of course, you can always increase the opacity, and this your subject is not
completely destroyed by the hard light when it's on a red or blue, saturated color background.
So... there we go. Just ENTER.
You can export this by going to File -> Save As and go Desktop, JPEG and... there we go.