Digital Diversity

This tutorial will show you how to place the main subject of a picture onto a white background using photoshop. These sorts of images are very popular with graphic designers because they can easily work the image around text in an article. It also puts the entire focus of the image onto the subject.

To do this tutorial you will need to already understand the following Photoshop techniques.
• Layers and masks
• Selection tools

This tutorial will work in both the full version of Photoshop as well as Elements.

Open up your image in Photoshop

Double click the background layer, a window will appear, click OK. This is to stop it being a background layer. Create a new layer beneath your subject layer and fill it in white.

The next step is to draw a selection around the subject, in this case the apple. Use what ever selection tool you are most comfortable with. For this image I used the magnetic lasso then touched it up with the selection brush (quick mask in CS).

Once you have created your selection you will need to feather it by about 2 pixels.  Select > modify > feather will bring up the window below. Set the value as 2 and click OK. This will help the edges of the image blend into the white background.

Add a mask to the subject layer. Invert your selection – Select > Inverse. Then fill the selection in black on the mask. You now have your subject on a white background.

To add a bit more depth to the image you will want to either bring back its shadow or add a reflection.

To bring back the shadow, duplicate your subject layer. Then use the mask to reveal the shadow. Use various brush softness and opacities to produce the best effect.

To create a reflection is a little bit more tricky but nothing too taxing. I need more room on my page to add a reflection so I will increase the canvas size.  Image > Canvas size… will bring up the window shown below. Increase the height by 200% and click the up arrow on the 9 square arrow grid. This will anchor the picture to the top of the page.

When you click OK the canvas will increase in height. You will possibly need to select your bottom white layer and fill the new area in with white.

Next duplicate your subject layer. Select the bottom of the 2 subject layers then flip it vertically by going Edit > Transform > Flip vertical. Once this is done move the upside down layer into position.

The 2 apples in my picture are at a funny angle. To fix this I first rotated the bottom apple to be in-line with the top apple.

Then I selected both apple layers and rotated them together till they were horizontal.

I then selected the bottom apple and slightly lowered its opacity to 81%.

Next I re-applied the selection to the bottom apple by clicking Ctrl + mouse click on the layers mask.

I then needed to set a gradient to fade from white to 30% black in the gradient options window. This can be found by selecting the gradient tool and then clicking the gradient options button that should now be at the top of the page. In the image below you can see a white to black gradient. The markers on the bottom of this are to select the colour. The markers above are to select the opacity.

Then I applied the gradient within the bottom apples selection on the mask to create a slight fade.

With the reflection in place I could see the the dark black line on the bottom of the apple was ruining the image. I simply removed this and rounded off the bottom with a little bit of cloning and the image was complete.

If you have the patience you can apply this technique to almost any image. For example bellow is an insect and its shadow isolated on a white background.

Tags: advanced masks, elements, insects, isolated subject, lasso, layers, magic wand, marquee, masking, masks, photo editing, photoshop, selection, selection brush, selection tools, thoughts, tutorial, tutorials, white background

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 14:17 and is filed under photoshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.