How To Clean Seamless Background Paper In Photoshop

So seamless paper can get dirty, torn or wrinkled in just a couple of uses. Rather than having to cut that paper after each shoot, well there’s a couple of ways that you can clean that up in Photoshop. In today’s video, I’m gonna show you two ways that you can clean up your backdrop paper in Photoshop. And it might even save you some money. Use photoshop to clean seamless background paper where floors are dirty and the background paper is wrinkled. Use this technique to learn how to clean a white background in photoshop.

Clean White Seamless Background

So with this photo here, this floor actually looks worse than it is right here because of the flash. It kind of whited out any of the smudges and dirt that’s on the floor right now, but we’re gonna preserve this shadow here. See the shadow down here. So with this technique, we should be able to keep the shadow. So what I’m gonna do first is make a copy of the background layer, Command+J, and come up here to Filter, Noise, Median. So right away, you see what median does. It distorts the floor down there. This can be, I would say something looks like around 43 or so in this case. And now I’m gonna say OK. And I’m gonna put a black layer mask by holding down Alt and clicking on the Add Layer Mask icon. And then I am going to make sure that my foreground color is white. B for the brush tool, and with a soft brush, I am going to, first I’m gonna zoom in here a little bit, come down here and as you could see, it’s already taking that dirt away, and see the shadow, it’s not even bothering the shadow at all. And so I’m just going to make my brush smaller here with my left and right bracket. And as you can see, I did get a little bit on that heel right there, but if I hit the X key and make my brush black, I can bring that back. Click X to continue to paint with white. And I can get fairly close. And like I say, if I get too close and get some of the white that goes on to the subject, I can change my brush to black and paint over it. So here we go. I’m just painting in this area making sure that I get everything. And I’m gonna change my brush to black, and I got a little bit right there. This is before, and this is after. It’s cleaned up my floor, but I still have the shadow down there. Like I say, this looked a lot worse before I took the photo. I was thinking, oh, I’m going to have to cut that paper, it’s just too dirty, but here you can do it in post.

Remove Wrinkles From Seamless Background Paper

Okay, so in this image, I wanna maintain everything you see about that background as far as the shading and the light. I just wanna get rid of some of these wrinkles and the dirt spots on the floor. But I wanna maintain everything else. So the first thing I wanna do is duplicate the background, Command+J, and then I’m going to use the lasso tool to make a selection. And I’m purposely staying away from the edges too much. The reason I’m doing this is I wanna take the subject out of the background so that I can do a little bit of work on the background itself, getting some of the wrinkles and spots out. So now I’m gonna come up here to Edit, Fill, and I’m going to select Content-Aware and make sure that Color Adaption is checked and make sure that blending mode is normal and opacity is 100. Say OK, and Photoshop is going to do its best to remove the subject from that background. And I’m gonna say Command+D to deselect all that. And I’m gonna use the patch tool ’cause I wanna get some of these dark spots out. I don’t need to be perfect on this because like I say, I want to maintain a lot of the dark spots here in basically the same area that they’re in. So I’m just right across from any of these shaded areas and make it a little bit lighter. And now I don’t need to make this perfect. Okay, so now what I wanna do is, I wanna make this layer here a smart object. So if I right-click and say Convert to Smart Object because I’m gonna use Gaussian blur here in case I wanna go back and change it. So if I come up to filter, blur, Gaussian blur, and if I change this all the way up to where I wanna get rid of a lot of this stuff. Just blurring it to get rid of the dirt on the background on the floor and some of the wrinkles on the back of the backdrop. And say OK. I’m gonna rename this BG, and I’m gonna make a copy of the background layer and I’m gonna call this subject. And I’m gonna move it up here to the top. And this time, I’m going to use the object selection tool. It’s new to Photoshop. I’m gonna get my selection, and there’s a couple of ways that you can refine that, but I’m just gonna use the quick selection tool down here to get around the bottom of the tennis shoes. That’s good. Now I’m gonna create a layer mask with a new layer mask icon. And now with a white brush, let me zoom in here, on the layer mask of the subject, I’m gonna paint white, B for the brush tool, and bring in some of the areas that the object selection tool did not bring in. That was a little bit up in his hair and on the pants there and down here where the shoes are. You could see that’s bringing in a little bit. There are some areas down here right around the bottom of the shoe that we can bring in. And that’s pretty good. Just wanna make sure we had this detail down here because we’re gonna bring in some shadows in a minute here. So now I’m gonna duplicate this subject layer, Command+J, and I’m going to delete this layer mask, and I’m gonna add a black layer mask by holding Alt+Option and clicking on the Add Layer Mask icon. And what I’m gonna use this for is to paint back some of the shadows. So with the brush, B for brush tool, make sure that my color is white that I’m painting with, and I’m gonna come down here and paint in some of the shadows in this area. And if that was a little bit too much back there, which I think it was, so I hit the eraser tool and just erase some of it away. If I turn all these off, that’s the way it did look. It’s kind of a guide for me. And I can bring down the opacity on that little bit on those shadows because it’s too dark. And now since we made that really smooth and everything, I think we need to add in a little noise, so I’ll create a new layer and come up here to Edit, Fill, and add 50% gray to that, and change the blend mode to overlay, and now, I can come up here to Filter, Noise, Add Noise. And three is probably good enough right there. And say OK. So now, I preserve some of those shadows back there and smooth out the background and the floor. So here’s another example as if I had made the background almost completely gray, and I just down here gently brought in the shadows. So I could’ve done that too, but I wanna preserve this as much as possible. So now to the question of the day, which of these techniques did you find helpful? Let me know in the comments below.