Backgrounds, Colors, and Contrast Techniques in Photoshop

Let's take a lot of the things we've learned so far and put them all together and see how they can work to put this bag on a new, more interesting background and change the color a little bit. So I wanna start by putting it on a different background. I've got the background in a different file, which I'm going to place into this one as a smart object.

So here we've got this background. Now it's rotated and so I want to put it this way. I'm gonna make sure I hold shift so it snaps to a 45 degree angle.

There we go, I like that. I need to make it fill this area. Now, if I just grab a corner, notice how it resizes from the corner, but if I hold option on the Mac or alt on Windows, notice how it resizes from the center and that's good.

I don't mind that I'm going a little bit bigger than 100% because if the background is a little bit blurry, that's okay, it can focus on the foreground. Blurry backgrounds are not too big of a problem and I'm not going that much bigger than 100% anyway. So now I've got my background.

Now I wanna put my foreground in front of it, but I can't drag that there because it's a background layer, meaning it's locked. I need to unlock it so it becomes a regular layer that I can move up above. I can simply call this bag.

Okay, so I've got the bag sitting on top of the background and now I wanna remove the background of the bag to show through to this background. So I select my bag and I'm gonna go into Select and Mask so I can preview my selection and I'm gonna generate this using Select Subject. Now, I can try Select Subject with the device on device where it generates a quick selection and I can preview this on layers to see this better.

It misses this huge section here. Let me try the cloud version of this, which usually is better most of the time and hit Select Subject. And even though it takes a little longer, it is definitely a better selection.

Normally, I like to use the cloud and in fact, I'd like to set it as a default. So let me just cancel this for a second. You can actually set that as a default so you don't have to choose it every single time.

If you're on Windows, you'll go to Edit and then go down to Preferences. But for those of us on a Mac, we go to our Photoshop menu, go to Settings and once you're in this menu, which is like the Preferences menu on Windows, then you can go to the Image Processing. In here, you'll find for Select Subject and Remove Background, what do you want it to do as a default? Now, you can still choose the other version, but if you set this to cloud, that's gonna be the default now.

So let me hit OK and I'm gonna go back into my Select and Mask and now the default, notice, is cloud. So I don't have to choose it every single time. Normally, that is the best option and even though it takes a little bit longer, it does create normally a better selection most of the time.

I'm gonna preview this on the layers to see how this looks and I'm gonna zoom in and take a closer look at the edges. Now, if you're just looking at it on layers, you might miss things. I think the overlay is actually a good way to look at this sometimes and there might be things that maybe you realize you were losing or things that it has that you don't want.

So here we can see that there are a couple pieces missing. I'd wanna go in with my paintbrush and add those pieces. So I could paint those in like so.

Here, I can click and if it's a pretty straight line, I could just shift click, but this is actually not exactly a straight line. It's kind of these little pieces here. So I'd wanna kind of paint those in.

Like so, doesn't have to be exactly smooth because this bag isn't exactly smooth, it's a canvas bag. So I'd wanna go through and paint anything that's not quite perfect. If there's missing areas, again, just paint those in, like so.

If there's any areas that included that it shouldn't, like this, I'd want to subtract those sections. Click, hold shift, click again, nice straight line, I like that. If there's areas like this that I don't want, I can go in with a nice small little brush, click, hold shift, click, click, hold shift, click, and get rid of these other areas.

Click, hold shift and click for the nice straight line. These areas that I wanna add, I'd go in with add and go in with a bigger brush and paint those in and so on. So I'm not gonna clean every single thing up, but you kind of get the idea that you wanna go through, clean everything up, make it all nice.

Preview that on your layers to see if it looks good. If there are any halos, little white areas all the way around, if they are consistent everywhere, then we could use a shift edge to shift it in. If they're not consistent everywhere, then keep in mind that when you shift this edge in, you might be removing valid edges that you don't wanna pull in that much.

So do be careful that you're not pulling it in in areas you don't want. You might have to individually paint some edges away, but in this case, I do think that there is kind of an overall edge that I need to pull in. I might also need to soften up the edge and also even smooth it a little bit because it might've been a little bit rough.

And overall, this is looking pretty good. I wanna come in a little bit more. There'd be some areas that I would clean up individually, like most of these edges are looking pretty good, but there are areas like over here.

It includes some of the background. So I'd remove that because I don't want that to be there and so on. So make it all cleaned up.

That's looking pretty good. I think I like that. So I'm gonna hit okay.

And I now have the thing isolated on its own layer. Very good. To make this look a little more believable on this background, I do think it needs a drop shadow.

So I'm gonna go in with that layer selected and add a drop shadow. Move this over to the side so I can see what I'm doing. I can drag the shadow into the position that I want.

If I need to see it more, I might wanna increase that opacity there. And the size is the softness. And so we can kind of set the angle and the distance by dragging or by using these controls here.

And I think something kind of like that I think is looking nice. Maybe a little too dark, so I'll lower that. Okay, so I think that's good.

Now, for the color of the background. It's not that I don't like the black, but let's say you want to have something cool as a background to contrast the warmer bag. So you wanna set it off.

So you wanna change the background color. I'm gonna select that layer. So my new layer will go on top of it.

And I'm gonna add, in this case, a hue saturation because I don't know exactly the color I want. I think I might want something cool, but I'm not sure. So I wanna play with it.

Here as I play with the hue, not really much is changing. And that's because it only changes the hue if there already was one. Black does not have a hue.

So I need to check on colorize. By checking on colorize, it says I will apply a color even if there was no color to begin with. And I'm gonna call this color.

So I can choose various colors, seeing what I like, just exploring them. And I kind of do like that kind of cooler blue color. I can change the saturation and I don't wanna go too wild with that.

I could also lighten or darken it if I feel like I need to. Something like, let's say, that I think looks good. Next up, there are some changes I wanna make to the bag.

Let's say I wanna change the contrast of the bag. Now there's the background behind this. So normally when you add an adjustment layer, let's say a curves layer, this would normally affect the entire image.

And let's say I wanna reduce the contrast here. So let's say I brighten up the dark areas to show more detail in them. And I pull back down the highlights.

This will do the contrast of the entire image. So let's call this contrast here. So I only want this to affect the bag.

I don't want it to change the other background. So I can clip it onto the underlying layer, either by option clicking or alt clicking on windows, or I could just go up here and click this little button right here to affect just the underlying layer. And now this only affects the bag.

And I can continue doing this. Now, if I wanna see this right from the beginning, let me just drag this to the trash. When I go in and I do the curves and I start to make this change, of course it affects all the layers.

I could just simply click that on and it affects just the underlying layers. That's easy. Also, another thing you can do if you wanna help force yourself to think about clipping it onto the previous layer and naming things is if you go into the menu and choose curves, it just does it.

It doesn't ask you any questions. But let me undo that. If I, let me just throw that into the trash.

If I hold option when I go into this button or holding alt, so option on the Mac, alt on windows, and then choosing curves, it says, hey, let me show you the options for that. So you can name it. Let's say I call this contrast and I can check this on right from the beginning.

So I made sure I've named it before I even create it. I can do my adjustment here. And because I checked on that option, it has already clipped it on.

So there are a variety of ways that you can create these clipping masks. But the idea here is that you continue to clip those adjustment layers onto something like this. So it's shown in the shape of this bag and you're only seeing that in the bag.

So let's say you wanna also add in vibrance. Again, I can hold option, go into vibrance. This would be alt on windows.

And it would ask me, or I could go in and just choose vibrance. And now, which layer was selected? I'll let me undo. Normally you select the topmost layer.

So you keep adding new things on top. Cause if you add them underneath, the order is the order of application. So that can change the appearance.

So I want it to affect the contrast and then do the saturation on top. So I didn't choose this topmost layer and have it visible before I went in and created this. So if I go in and choose vibrance, it creates it on top and then I could clip it on.

And let's say I do some saturation. I think in this case, I want it to be more apparent, more saturated. So I'm gonna use saturation as opposed to vibrance, which is a bit more subtle.

By the way, if you ever want to reset these, you can simply double click and it resets those very quickly. So I like the saturation in this case. Kind of really brings out that warmth.

Now, speaking of warmth, I think I want a little bit more warmth. So really I'm gonna make this layer, I'm gonna call this color and contrast for the name of this layer. And I've done the contrast here on the composite, but let's say I want to bring out some more warmth.

Some more yellowness, right? Blue is the opposite of yellow. So if I go into blue, if I pull up on the blue, it adds more blue, which is less warm. That's more cool.

If I pull down on that, it makes more yellow. Now it does look kind of yellowy, which I want some warmth. Yellow is part of that, but I think we also go to red and we push up the red as well.

So a little bit of red and yellow together, make some orange. We don't have to do a lot of this though. We could just do a little teeny bit of each and that way it just adds some more additional warmth to that and really warms that up.

So we make this nice contrast between the warmth of the bag and the coolness of the background. The point here is that you can play and experiment with these things. And this shows you another use of these clipping masks, which are really useful for clipping these adjustments onto one particular area of your image.

So try this out in exercise 5C.