Last month, I showed you how to make a transparent background, this month, I’ll show you how to remove a foreground object.
You’ll learn how to turn this:
To that.
Don’t worry, like most of the effects I’ve shown you so far, it’s very simple to do, and is an amazing time saver.
Step 1. To keep things simple, I’ll just use the same beach picture.
Step 2. Choose the Lasso tool, and draw a circle around the object you want to remove. Be sure to get a bit of the background into the selection.
Step 3. Go up to Edit – Fill, and choose Content Aware from the drop-down.
Click ‘Okay’ and the object should have disappeared, and now should be replaced with the background. Click back to the Lasso tool and Deselect, and you can now save your new foreground object removed picture.
And that’s it! Told you it was easy.
It does get a little trickier if there’s different parts to the background. For example, if you’re trying to remove multiple objects from a more complicated image, it may get ‘confused’ and remove an object in the sky by replacing it with ground, and an object on the ground with sky. This is slightly annoying, but you can always undo and redo this effect as many times as needed until you get the object out. I actually had this problem while I was working on my newest book (The Haunted Corpse) cover.
This was the original image:
And this is my cover:
I got the moon and birds out without much issue, but the lady standing to the very right of the castle was a different story. Because I’d replaced objects in the sky, every time I tried to replace her, it kept replacing her with clouds, instead of with trees. It took a while, but I finally got it. If that happens to you, I recommend removing the objects one at a time. So, remove an object from the image, save, re-open, remove the second object, save, etc. It takes longer, but it will keep photoshop from getting confused. (Hopefully)
Next month, I’ll show you the opposite, how to remove backgrounds from the image.
Like this tutorial? Check out the rest of the series here!
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