This is my first guide so sorry if it's not that great xD In this tutorial I'm going to teach you how to seperate an image from its background(also known as rendering) in photoshop. This is a very basic for making good signatures and just using photo editing softwares in general. This requires very little knowledge of photoshop and is a must when making sigs or graphics. The finished product is going to look like this First you want to find a pic i used a neopets background cuz i was too lazy to find anything else xD Spoiler Once you've decided on your pic you're ready to start. First open your pic up in photoshop by either copying it and going "file>new>ok" or saving it to your computer and going "file>open" and find where your pic was saved. Next select the pen tool. Now zoom in using "ctrl+" until you've zoomed in about 800 to 1600%. Now with the pen tool click somewhere on the EDGE of the thing you're trying to remove from the background. This will create what is called an anchor point and it will look like this. Once you've created your first anchor point click farther along on you pic following the object. When you click farther along on the object photoshop will make a line. Dont worry about following curves i'll explain that soon. It will look like this. Once you made the line you're going to want it to contour to the object and if there's curves in your object straight lines just won't contour. Your in luck though photoshop has a nifty little feature that allows you to add anchorpoints on already made lines. To do this right click on the pen tool and while holding the right click mouse over the add anchor point tool which looks like this. Now with this selected click on the line that's between your two anchor points and you'll notice a third anchor point in the middle of your lline which will look like this. Another way to do this is just with the regular pen tool selected click on an already made line and it will add another anchorpoint where you clicked. Now to make this contour to you curve use the direct selection tool. and with this tool click and drag the middle anchorpoint and as you drag it the line will curve and start to look like this. Now if you have a curve that is wider/narrower than what photoshop has made you can click on the two diamonds at the ends of the middle anchorpoint. By dragging these two diamonds you can make the curves wider or narrower until it fits the object. Now i suggest you get a drink, a snack, and some happy music because this is the most tedious part of the process. You now need to go around the object with the pen tool by clicking and bending the lines until they fit the object. Some tips to make this easier are to not try to get miniscule things on the object such as thin strands of hair, or glowing parts, also don't bend the lines until you have gone completely around the object, instead make straight lines and add the middle anchorpoints as you're going around the object and once you've finished going around the object move the anchorpoints to fit the object. When making the lines contour to the object try to keep the inside the faded grey pixels because when you make this a selection it will expand and you will end up with an unsightly border around the object. After you've wasted a good hour of your life doing this you should have something that looks like this before you make the curves. and after you make the curves And now for the easy part in the layers panel click on the layer mask option. When you click on this option it's going to change your foreground and background colors to black and white and put a white box next to the thumbnail pic on the layer. Now click on the white box next to the thumbnail pic and select black as your foreground color. Now with the paint bucket tool(i assume everybody knows what this is xD) and click anywhere on the picture. Now before you freak out and flame me with "WTF I JUST SPENT FOREVER ON THAT WHY DID IT JUST DISAPPEAR!?!?!?!?!?!?" i'm going to give you a little lesson on layer masks . A layer mask is exactly what its name implies, something that masks over a layer. Just with layer masks you only have two color choices, black and white, only these two colors don't really mean black and white. These two colors now mean transparent or visible. With layer masks black= transparent and white=visible. Now the reason your whole pic disappeared is because that mask covered the entire layer and you filled it with the color that makes it transparent( a.k.a black). Now to see your whole pic again you can right click on the now black box and click disable layer mask, and enable to make it disappear again. Anyways to actually do something with your outline click on the "paths" tab in the layers panel. now right click on the thing that says "work path" and choose "make selection..." After you choose this you're going to get a pop up that looks something like this. Match your settings to this and hit ok. You now have a selection in the shape of your object on a gray and white grid. Now go back to the layers tab and click on the black box to make sure you have the layer mask selected. Now hit delete and you'll see your object magically appear before your eyes. Now you're not done quite yet but we are in the last 100m of this (yay cross country jokes xD) If you are happy with what you see you can delete the layer mask(right click on the black box and choose "discard layer mask") and hit "ctrl+shift+i" and this will select everything but the object. Hit delete and you have successfully removed the object from it's background If you aren't happy with what you see with the layer mask hit "ctrl+alt+z" to undo until your shape isn't a selection anymore and adjust your shape until it fits and continue on with the rest of it . CONGRATULATIONS! you have successfully removed an object from its background now I'd suggest doing this even if an object is on a completely white background because you will get a very unprecise cut and end up with a white border around the object that just looks wierd when making graphics thanks for reading If there's anything wrong or anything i should add just post here
Re: [TUT] Sepereating pics from their backgrounds with the Pen Great guide, this is called vectoring right?
Re: [TUT] Sepereating pics from their backgrounds with the Pen I guess it could be considered vectoring although i never really knew a real name for this other than removing an object from its background xD but i guess since your using vector paths to seperate the object yea its vectoring
Re: [TUT] Sepereating pics from their backgrounds with the Pen Nice guide! + Rep It looks like you're pretty skilled at cutting out images. I always find it extremely difficult.
Re: [TUT] Sepereating pics from their backgrounds with the Pen It is call "RENDERING" you might want to ADD, when RENDERING you should enlarge the image to 2x the size. After you finish, resize it back to original size. Load your original image, paste the rendered image onto it, position EXACT place of the original. hold ctrl and click on the rendered image, this will highlight the rendered image while you are on original image, shift+ctrl+I to inverse select, then delete. dispose of the rendered image, and keep the image you just cut out this will give you absolute perfect render image good guide, i rate the rendered 5/10 thou still have the black out line where it shouldn't Tip: select the image, select > modify > smooth > 2px (or more if the black line still there) inverse select and delete.
Re: [TUT] Sepereating pics from their backgrounds with the Pen Thanks for the tip on what it's called but as for making it twice as large i have it in there to zoom in to 800-1600%... Also what are you talking about positioning the rendered image over the original? That's what the layer mask is for, to make sure the selection you have is decent enough to use. And lastly the rendered image at the top is a quick job xD if i was gonna use it in a sig i would've spent a good hour or so really getting into every nook and cranny but i only spent like 10 to 20 min cutting it out cuz i did it a first time and spent my good hour or so but my computer overheated and crashed so i was really not in the mood to spend another hour cutting it out perfectly so i did a quick job so i could just actually start putting this together xD Oh and thanks cheeto yea the really big thing is having the patience to actually go all the way around the image and get things to actually work xD that's probably one of the hardest parts xD