When working with graphic files, it is often necessary to remove the background around an object. This may be due to the insertion of this element of the photograph into some composition, or the desire to replace the background of the picture. In this regard, a popular question arises: "How to remove the background of a photo in Photoshop?"
Plain background removal
Considering the issue of clearing the background in a photograph, it is worth considering separately the question of how quickly to remove a background that has a uniform shade in Photoshop. This will avoid unnecessary work required when removing the colored part of the picture.
Before you delete the necessary fragment of the photo, you must select it. You can do this in dozens of different ways, but if you want to highlight a specific color shade, then in Photoshop there is a special tool that allows you to do this as quickly as possible. Selecting the "Highlight" menu item in the quick access panel, you need to find the "Color range" item.
In the window that appears, it remains to select the Eyedropper tool and click on the background that you want to select. With the help of the sliders, it remains only to adjust the highlighted area and click "Yes." The result of these actions will be the selection of all areas of the photo containing the selected color. To delete, you need to press the "Del" key on the keyboard. This method is one of the simplest, most qualitatively solving the problem of how to remove the background in "Photoshop".
Magic cleaning
An analogue of such background removal is the Eraser tool, which can perform this action even faster. To do this, just select the "Magic Eraser" and click once in the background - as a result, a chess background will appear in its place, which symbolizes the presence of a transparent part of the photo. The downside of this approach is the lack of control over the area that will be removed, as opposed to using quick selection.
In order to provide control over how to remove the background in "Photoshop" without consequences for the rest of the photo, it is worth using another "magic" tool that works by the same algorithm with an eraser, but performs selection instead of deletion. There are two such tools, and they perform the same actions - “Magic Wand” and “Quick Selection”. The only difference is that the “wand” requires a step-by-step selection of the shade, and the selection allows you to move the cursor over a large space of the picture immediately.
Quick mask mode
Previous approaches - the answer to the question of how to remove a white background. In Photoshop, in addition to the monochrome background, it is possible to clear and multi-color. Such a need may arise if an inappropriate landscape is depicted there. So how do you remove the background in Photoshop?
There are also several ways to accurately remove the necessary part of the photo. The first one is to use the Quick Mask. A mask is a special mechanism that allows the user to paint over the area to be selected using drawing tools. To quickly switch to the Quick Mask, just press the letter Q on the keyboard. Then, using a brush and an eraser, you need to paint over the part of the photo that needs to be deleted. Returning to normal mode by pressing the same key, we notice that the necessary area of the picture will be highlighted - to delete it, it remains to press the already familiar Del key.
Removing the background using Lasso
If the object around which you want to highlight the background has fairly clear boundaries, then there is another convenient way, as in "Photoshop" to remove the background. To do this, use the Lasso tool. It is provided to the user in three forms. The first has a similar name, "Lasso" - it allows you to arbitrarily draw lines for the future allocation of the area. With its help, it is quite difficult to precisely select the necessary part, therefore, two other versions of the tool are more often used.
The next one is the “Straight Lasso” - with its help you can draw a selection area using straight lines. In this way, a clear boundary can be drawn, for example around buildings or angular geometric shapes.
For more complex elements, such as a person’s silhouette, use the Magnetic Lasso. It, thanks to its algorithm of actions, moves along the contour of the object, determining it with the help of the color difference - it’s enough to approximately move the mouse cursor around the photo element.
As a result of using Lasso, the element itself will be highlighted. In order to perform the deletion, the selection should be inverted by pressing the key combination Ctrl + I. Then you can delete the background.
other methods
It is worth noting that, in understanding how to remove the background in Photoshop, you can find several more different ways. However, most of them are performed quite difficult, allowing you to make the deletion more clear. However, one can achieve a good result with simpler means, spending a little more perseverance and effort on this, while even possibly saving a little time.