How to Select Subjects and Refine Edges in Photoshop | Easily Select, Refine, Blend with Ease

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Learn essential Photoshop techniques to make your editing process a breeze. Select Subjects and Refine Edges in Photoshop. Easily Select, Refine, Blend with Ease

Select Subjects and Refine Edges

 How to select subjects and refine edges and blend images in Photoshop. We’re going to remove the background of this subject. And we’re going to put her on this background layer. We’re not going to worry too much about sizing.

There are a lot of ways to remove the background from a subject. We can use the select subjects here on the contextual task bar. We just hit that. And we can come over here to the bottom of the layers panel and click and create a layer mask. And you can still see white around the edges of her hair. Could do it that way. or in the contextual toolbar, you can click Remove Background. And you could still see the edges of her hair. There’s still some white coming through. So we’re going to have to refine the background.

So let’s come up here. We’ll click on our object selection tool. Click on Object finder. Subject to selected. We just click on that. And there we have our selection. And at the top we can come up to Select and Mask and click on that. So now already you can see that we have a pretty good selection. there isn’t too many areas where there is any white showing through. There’s a little bit. that method works pretty good.

I have it on. Onion skin. real time. Refinement is checked. I’m going to shift the radius just a little bit. Click on Smart Radius. Also. Sometimes all you need to do is shift the edge. If you shift it one way. can look at the edges and see that. You may not like that. You can shift it the other way. And that looks a little better. can find your sweet spot.

And I’m just going to barely shift the edge. and also if you find that there is some areas where the color is coming through white, in this case you can come up to the Refine Edge brush. And just brush in the area that you want refined. And then we’re going to output this to a layer mask and say okay. so far the object selection and the selected mask work the best to cut out a person and get rid of most of the background color. If there is any.

So now we need this background to blend in a little bit better. Usually you would see the background blurry. And that will help out the composition of the subject a lot more. for layer zero here I’m going to convert this to a Smart object. And then I’m going to come up to. Filter neural filters. And we have something over here called depth blur. Click on the button. And you can adjust the blur strength. You can see it in the background. There. To your taste. I’m going to leave it as it is. And the output. Is on Smart Filter. I’m going to say okay.

So now we blurred the background So now that we have the background blurred, we’re going to blend the colors in to have her fit more in the colors of the background. layer one selected. Come up to the top to filter. Neural filters. And over here we have something called harmonization. Click on that button. And click on select a layer. Click on layer zero. And so you can see that now she is blended in with the background layer. Even better. So the colors are matching. And of course you can adjust the strength. In any of the other colors you would like to. I’m going to select Smart Filter for the output and say okay.

So now we have the background blurred. The subject is harmonized with the background layer. And with layer one selected now we can use the selection brush.

The selection brush should be up here. It’s under L at the top. We’re going to click on that. And we’re going to leave the overlay color at magenta. We want a soft brush. Bring down the hardness. Opacity. We’re going to keep it at around 30 because we want the edges of our hair to blend in with the background. So it’s going to be soft. It’s going to be a little out of focus.

So now as I paint around her hair. Along the edges with the background. Something like this. And hopefully what we’re going to get is we’re going to get the edges of her hair. Softly blend in with the background. Now we’re going to use AI I’m going to use generative fill. And I’m going to type in curly hair and say generate. And let’s see if this gives us what we want. So there is option one. Option to option three. If you don’t like those options you can click generate again. And as we’re going through the options. I actually like option one. So very easily we’ve blended that subject into that image.

Let me know in the comments how you’ve used the Selection Brush tool. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more tutorials on Photoshop. Remember, it’s never too late to learn. Thanks for watching!

See my photography blog here ➡️ https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com

Read my previous blog article here ➡️ Exciting Updates: Photoshop (April 2024) Beta AI Features