How To Remove a White Background in Photoshop – 3 Easy Ways

Today we’re talking about how to remove white backgrounds in Photoshop. Three easy and quick ways. In this example, we’re working with this background image

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And we’re also going to use another image that’s a stock image that is on a white background.

So we’re going to cut this image out of the background, and we’re going to place it on the image above. To cut this image out of the background, we’re going use the magic wand tool. So let’s look at some of the settings.

So we can set a different sample average up here. We’re gonna use point sample since we’re mainly concerned with just choosing the white colors. And for tolerance, we’re gonna leave that around five. So tolerance determines the color range of selected pixels. And so a higher value selects a broader range of color so we want mainly white, so we’re gonna keep it low like around five. Anti-alias, that creates a smoother edge selection so we’re gonna definitely leave that on. Continuous selects only adjacent areas using the same colors. So we’re just going to leave that off. And as far as settings, that will do it. So now with the magic wand tool selected, we can just click on the image and it started to make a selection. If you press Shift, it’s going to add to the selection. So anywhere that we need to select again, as long as we have the Shift pressed down, we can keep on adding to the selection. So just looking around the image here, that looks pretty good. One good thing about this here, what it did not select is the shadow. Just wanted you to see that. That’s gonna help when we drop it in the image behind it. So now that we’ve made a selection with the magic wand, I’m gonna highlight the layer where we made the selection. Come down here to the bottom. And hold Alt or Option and add layer mask.

Now we have this heavy machinery here that is cut out from the white background. If I turn off the layer below, you could see the transparency.

And now we can come in here and clean this up. By pressing Command+T, I can come in here and resize and move this all around. And we can work on this further. Hit the layer mask selected. And this is just to give you an idea if I use the brush tool and I paint with black, and of course, take my time. I’m not going to take all your time to show you this, but I will work with this and bring it back in when I’m done so that you could see what it looks like. See, this is why I kept the shadow ’cause I can paint away what I don’t want. And kinda blend it in. And so just as an example of what you can do. And you can take your time working on it. And I’m on the layer mask and I have black as my color that I’m painting with and I am painting out areas that I do not want. And I can go through the whole image and do that. So here’s the image all cleaned up now, and all I did was continue to paint with black on the layer mask, cleaning up some of the edges. In a case like this, it looks pretty good with the selection done by the magic wand tool. And if I click Shift, you can click on the layer mask. Here’s our piece of machinery on white background. By clicking Alt+Option and click on the thumbnail, here is my mask and just clicking around here you see I did a pretty good job in cutting this out.

Not 100% perfect, but it looks pretty good. So as far as cutting this image out of its white background, that part’s done. Now, obviously this image could use a lot more work. The colors could be matched and a few things could be done to make it blend more into this image, but this is the general idea in how good the magic wand tool is at getting that detail and perfect for cutting an image out of a white background.

So in this example, we’re gonna use the blend mode to help use cut our subject out of the background. So here we have a yellow background,

and here’s our subject on a white background.

So what we can do is use the multiply blend mode because it darkens.

So now as you can see, all the dark areas are coming through, and to get rid of that, we can do Control+J, Command+J. I made a copy of that background layer. And changed the blend mode back to normal.

So now we’re gonna go back to the magic wand tool. And here are the settings. We’ll keep it at Point Sample. Also the tolerance, if I just click in here, you can see that there’s a big area that it did not select. So Command+D will get rid of that selection and if I raised the number to, say, 30 and click, it’s selected more around the subject. The higher number, the more it’s gonna get selected, but there is an area where you need to try different settings to see how the selection comes out for you. And holding down the Shift, it looks pretty good. We got a lot of areas that are selected already.

Then we can come down here to the add layer mask, hold down the Alt or Option key and click and there is our layer mask.

So now that we have our layer mask, we can go around the image and kinda see what we need to touch up. And if you wanna know more about layer mask, up in the card there should be a link to a video on layer mask, and I’ll put a link in the description. But going around the image, just checking to see if there’s any places that maybe we could take care of. And I am painting with black right around this area right here. Okay, pretty good. So continuing with a soft round brush and the foreground color black, I’m going to paint on the outside of her hair. It’s probably the hardest part of cutting somebody out of any background is the hair. But in this case, it’s working fairly good. Just takes a little patience, go slowly, I like to move around going in sections, especially this area up here where it’s hair’s going a lot of different ways. It is difficult to cut out and it’s the challenge. Right here we’re doing composites and cutting people out of a background of any color. I’m not gonna spend any more time at this. You can take your time if you would like to do it on your own. You can try different backgrounds. Now it should work with for other backgrounds. So the hair still looks good, nice cut out. Pretty quick and you can even put somebody on a background like that.

Sure, it needs a little bit more work in matching the light between the subject and background, but this is an example. It didn’t take that long. And we have the subject cut out of a white background.

So in this next example, we’re gonna use something called Select Subject. And up here where the magic wand menu is, there’s something called Select Subject. And when we click on that, Photoshop did a pretty good job of selecting this subject. Come down here to where it says add layer mask, click on that, and there you could see where it’s transparent. Here is the subject cut out.

So now that we’ve used this Select Subject to cut our subject out, we can refine the layer mask. This is what the layer mask looks like right now. So we can refine that mask by double clicking on the mask. I am going to select a mask. So with this on, view on black. I can use a refine edge tool. And just paint. Put it on the outside or over the hair and let Photoshop refine that edge.

And we can move around the image, and see where else we can use this tool. Brought that fingernail back. So now we can put this to a layer mask. Go to see the layer mask now. And click on Alt+Option, and you see, the layer mask is not bad.

We can refine that further by using our brush tool and using the overlay mode, using white as our foreground color and just in certain areas, we can paint anywhere where we see the layer mask needs some refining. So again, here’s the refined layer mask. Clicking Alt or Option turns this on and off.

If I remove the white layer below, you can see that all the hair right here has been cut out all the way around all the little fine hairs. So that is combining Select Subject and a little bit of the refine mask tools in Photoshop to cut out a subject from a white background. So cutting subjects out of any background can be difficult. But these techniques that I just showed you will work well for white backgrounds.