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Writer's pictureSergio Peraza

How to Remove the Background of an Image in Photoshop

Searching "how to cut out the background of an image" in Google or YouTube, you'll find a million different tutorials and I'm positive there's just about a million different ways to actually remove the background of pictures in Photoshop. For this particular tutorial, I'm going to focus on the Quick Selection Tool.

Here is a video I made about this subject to help anyone get a visual of this process

The reason I'm focusing on the Quick Selection Tool is because I think it's one of the fastest and easiest ways to remove the background of a picture - personally, I think the Quick Selection Tool is super beginner friendly as compared to the Pen Tool, which I think has a big learning curve for someone who is just jumping into using Photoshop. Before getting started - I like to make sure my image is at 300 dpi. Having your image at 300 dpi helps especially with scaling down your image when you zoom in. To change your image dpi, go to your taskbar at the top of the Photoshop application, then click on image, then choose image size. Here you'll get a popup that will you let you edit the size of your image - most commonly an image will be at a resolution of 72 dpi, change this number to 300.


After changing the resolution of the photo, the next thing I like to do is duplicate the layer of my image; this isn't necessary, but it's helpful to have a reference and also to have something to go back to if you make a mistake later on. Make sure to make one of the layers not visible - so when we cut out our selections we can actually see what we cut out and not the layer under it. The next step is to actually select the Quick Selection Tool, we can press 'W' on our keyboard to choose the Quick Selection Tool or we can manually choose it from the sidebar/toolbar - if you've never use the Quick Selection Tool before it might select the Magic Wand Tool when you press 'W', all you you need to do is right click the Magic Wand symbol on your toolbar and choose the Quick Selection Tool instead.

Once you have the Quick Selection Tool ready, all you have to do is drag the tool/brush on your image, trying to select everything in your background and not the focus or foreground of your picture. This tool is very good at identifying edges, and if your picture has a very clear identifiable edge, this should be very easy. If your image is a little blurry or the background and foreground are similar in color/shade it might have a hard time identifying the edges your trying to not cut out - to remove any selections you don't want all you need to do is press the 'Alt' key (The default setting for the Quick Selection Tool is set to the plus sign, which means you're adding more to your selection. When you press the 'Alt' key it changes your curser to a minus sign, which means you're removing or taking away from your selection.) and you can drag the edges of your selection to where you want to the be, this is how you get more precise selections.



When you have your selection you want to cut out ready, the next step is to smooth the lines of your selection. Go to the top of your taskbar, Click Select - Modify - Smooth. This will bring up a popup that allows you to put a number into the Sample Radius size - this is purely subjective and you can experiment with whatever you number you want. I usually use between 3 and 5 pixels in my sample radius. The smaller your selection, the smaller the number you want to use in your sample radius - if you put too big of a number in it might split your selection up or possibly not let you smooth your lines.

After smoothing your lines, press 'Delete' on your keyboard to cut out your selection, I like to use the eraser tool to clean up any lines or areas that are sloppy. You should see the background is now transparent.


 

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