photoshop people

goodoneian · Apr 12, 2009

i'm not sure how hard this would be to do or not, but is it possible to make say a greyish brown background (such as the one in this picture) completely blown out to white, without it looking cheesy and obviously photoshopped? i've tried a couple different ways but i'm not having much luck.

also, if anyone could direct me to some sort of tutorial on how to do this that would be appreciated as well

this is not the picture i wish to have with a white background, it's just an example of the wall color i have to work with

volcomstone6 · Apr 13, 2009

theres a lot of ways of doing this but the easiest and possibly the most affective(if you have the time), would be to first magic wand that bad boy, than anything that it couldn't catch just fix with the lasso, than just take the brush and change the color, but to be perfectly honest, the end result may not be promising because from what it sounds like you dont know how to use the specifics of each of the tools, but the general direction is to just use those tools

Unmanedpilot · Apr 13, 2009

I gave it a shot and came up with this:

What I did was make a new layer then selected the background color of the photo with the replace color tool and did my best getting as much white as I could by increasing lightness to 100% and the fuzziness ~8. Play around with the selected color(s) to get as much done as you can with that tool. Some parts of the subjects faces changed color with higher fuzziness, but that's an easy fix by making a layer mask and restoring the original layer.

Parts of the outlines weren't blending very well with the replace color so I just made a new layer, and just painted the problem areas with white. The areas I needed to focus on were the girls hair, and the boys cheek all the way to the left of the photo.

It's fairly easy and uses simple tools, its just time consuming. I'm no expert with PS so perhaps someone else has a better way to do it? I gave it my best shot.

mcuccia · Apr 13, 2009

I think Unmanedpilot delivered a pretty good result given that he only had a low-res image to try. Quality will improve drastically with a high-res image!

manaheim · Apr 13, 2009

good, look at the "Select->Color Range" tool and then use the eyedropper to select the background. Holding shift and clicking repeatedly will increase the color range in your selection. Adjust the fuzziness bar (or whatever the heck that slider is called) to refine. Do a Select->Modify->Feather and feather it by 2-3 pixels (depends on image resolution) and you should have a pretty darn good select.

Now what you do with it varies from there... my first inclination would be to try to do a layer mask and do an overlay of white that is partially translucent... that way it would pull in some of the color and shading from the background, not totally mangle your edges, etc. I think this would help a lot with your "keeping it from looking too over-photoshopped".

I'd try it myself but don't have photoshop on the work box... my guess is this would be a great approach, though.

Big Mike · Apr 13, 2009

You can make anything, even a black wall, look white in a photo...Photoshop not required. Just put enough light onto it and it will show up white.

goodoneian · Apr 13, 2009

thank you for the tips, i'll keep your method in mind next time i try it unmannedpilot. it doesn't seem like its really that hard at all

and yes i know i can make any wall white with light mike, i just have very limited space so it makes it difficult to do at times.

goodoneian · Apr 13, 2009

well i think i figure it out pretty well.

i'm pretty satisfied with how this looks, the edges really aren't too shopped' looking which is what i was going for you could say

Moon Baby · Apr 13, 2009

Another thing you could do is duplicate the layer and set it to luminance, whip out your dodge tool and set opacity to around 30ish% and set your brush to 'highlights' depending on the darkness of your background you'll probably have to set your brush according to the tones, but let's say your background is just off white or gray.
Now all you do is paint away, you can accidentally rub against your subject without much noticeable damage if it's set to highlights. It's a little tedious but it gets the work done.
Imo, colored backgrounds beat the crap out of pure white. It just looks way commercial for my tastes...
In that case, once you blow out your background to complete white, flatten it. Alt + click your image to remove it as a background image and then create a solid color layer or any design you want. Set the original picture to "multiply" and the white background will disappear, revealing the colored layer.

Unmanedpilot · Apr 14, 2009

I think that looks good!

manaheim · Apr 14, 2009

Looks good... so what was your method?

goodoneian · Apr 15, 2009

i basically used unmanned pilots method but since that was the simplest for me. i just messed with the fuzziness until i was happy then just erased any of the white that got on my friend

i did try your method though manaheim but i'm not gonna lie i got a little confused with the shift clicking and feathering.