white background in photoshop

Charliedelta · Mar 14, 2015

I did a photo shoot with a model who is standing in front of a wall. The wall used to be white, it's dirty and has some small pictures on it. I would like to make the background all white. The clone stamp tool is not an option because there is too much dirt in the wall. So I thought to do a selection of the model, refine it, then invert the selection and do "fill-in" and choose white and that would work. It does work, but the white is very bright to the point that it looks unnatural.

Would you use other tecniques?

Is there any ways to make the white less bright?

AKUK · Mar 14, 2015

Make the selection then create a new layer. Fill with white. You can then use the opacity slider to control the brightness. Any bits that are still showing you can simply create another empty layer and paint white on those areas, until gone. Just be mindful of the selection as you don't want it going over hair, etc. If it does, just use the mask feature and paint those bits invisible.

Buckster · Mar 14, 2015

Use the healing brush, the spot healing brush, the paint brush, and the clone tool(s) in conjunction with one another to get rid of the distractions on the wall, while retaining the "reality" of it being a real wall.

If you're going to use a masking to drop in a new background, any solid color will almost always look unnatural because real life isn't usually perfect like that. Even seamless paper has a texture to unless you totally blow it out. Nonetheless, there are lots of ways to try to deal with it, from simple gradients to fake shadows to adding noise, etc., but it's a lot of work to turn a flat color into something that looks "natural".

If it were me wanting to use masking techniques to achieve the goal, I'd drop in a better wall, white or otherwise, that's an actual wall, and that will actually look "natural" as a real wall does, because it is.

If the white background you dropped in is just "too white", then simply don't use pure white. Use an off-white instead. Then you get the added benefit of being able to precisely control hue, saturation and luminance to taste on it as well.

KmH · Mar 15, 2015

One of the nice things about Photoshop is there are usually many ways to do essentially the same thing.

You can use a variety of selection tools and their options - Quick selection tool, Color Range feature, etc - and then have many options for editing the color and exposure value of the background.
You can select the background directly or you can select your subject and then invert the selection.
With the selection active you could make a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and move the Saturation slider all the way to the left to completely desaturate the background.
I find I use the Spot Healing Brush and the Healing Brush a lot more than I use the Clone Stamp tool.