The best way of Hair Masking and Portrait Background change (Lesson 43)

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In this video, I showed the best way of hair masking and portrait background change. I discussed when to avoid using background eraser tool and using Topaz Photoshop plugins to get better results. I discussed in detail about Topaz remask specifically Topaz remask 5 for portrait hair masking and then portrait background changing. Although there are many other tools or options in Topaz Photoshop plugins bundle, I only discussed about Topaz remask 5 which is very similar to Topaz remask 3 and workable if anybody knows either of them. I showed the use of Topaz remask 5 to cut out hair properly with perfect edges and then using Pen tool and remove the rest of the background for a perfect portrait background change.

From this lesson, you will learn how to do hair masking in Photoshop using Topaz remask and change portrait background.

This lesson, The best way of hair masking and portrait background change (Lesson 43) is in 2 versions as always. You can either watch the English or the Bangla version.

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Source of images:

Photo by Gilmanshin from pixabay

pixabay.com/en/young-girl-room-white-cute-happy-510441/

Photo by KreativeHexenkueche from pixabay

pixabay.com/en/background-texture-old-vintage-2482326/

English Subtitle:

Hello viewers! I am Rakib. Welcome to the last Chapter of Photoshop Tutorial series which is Projects and commands. In this lesson, we will see how to do hair masking of portrait images and change background. When we do hair masking if there is just a single color then we can simply use Background Eraser tool but when there is multiple colors present then it becomes more difficult and also the result will not be that good. So in this case, what I will use is Topaz Photoshop Plugins. Topaz is a Photoshop plugin in which there are a lot of tools or options that can be used for various purposes. Topaz Remask is one of them which I will be using for hair masking in this lesson. Like any other software you can setup it in your computer. But I am letting you know that it is a paid software. If you successfully setup it into your system and then go to: Filter then you will be able to see this "Topaz Labs". As I said before Topaz is a bundle of plugins and here you can see 3 plugins because during the setup I only selected these 3. From these, I will use Topaz Remask. The version is 5. If you use 3 or any other version then you may see a little difference but if you learn the Remask 5 properly then you will be able to do it on version 3 or any other versions properly. So let's select it first. So now we are in the interface of Topaz Remask. In here, you can see within the Primary tab this Blue colored Brush is selected which is compute Brush. First we will use this brush. Let's increase the brush diameter. I did it using the right square bracket from the keyboard but you can do it from here using this slider as well. So, first we will select the areas where the background and hair are mixed. I am selecting the areas using this brush. We will try our best to select least possible areas. So from here we can make this brush smaller and continue selection. Selecting only necessary areas will give you better results. Now we will draw boundaries from both sides. The reason is we need to remove the green area which is outside the Blue line. So we have to fill this area with Red color. To fill this area, from "Fills" option we have to select the Red brush and click here once. If we didn't have separated the lower areas using those boundaries then the entire green area would have been selected now. But as we want only the upper areas outside the Blue line so we have used these boundaries to separate them and then used the Red brush from the Fills to select this area. Now, you may think why the lower areas are not selected as these are also the parts of the background? We didn't select those areas because we will remove them later using the Pen tool for the sharp cut. You could use this Remask to do it completely but it will not look that good. So for a better result, we will use the Pen tool for this cutout as there is no hair in these areas. So, as you can see the entire image is now separated in 3 different colors. May be this is why it is called Trimap. The Green color is safe zone. From these areas nothing will be changed. The Red areas will be removed completely. And the Blue colored areas will be computed that means the background areas will be removed and the hairs will be kept. This is mainly the critical part that this software will do for us. So, after separating the image in 3 colors we will click the Button Compute Mask. Now you can see we are automatically switched to Mask tab and we can see the result in Black and White version. You can get a better view if you select the 'Keep' tab. You can see the result is shown in a transparent background. In most cases, we may need to select different colors as background to see the result details and make corrections properly. So, if I click this Solid color button then you can see a background is set with a color which was used before. If you want then you can scroll down and click "Select New Color" and then pick a different color for it. Finally, you have to click OK to apply the change. And if you want to undo your changes then you can use this button for Undo or this button which is currently not active can be used for Redo when you are in the interface of the Topaz Remask. And after that, we have to make some corrections. You can see some issues here. For the corrections we will use this Cut Brush. Using this brush, where we want to clean up the background we just have to click there. Let's make the brush a bit smaller. If you click once like this then it will make the correction. Let's undo this change. After cleaning all the unnecessary areas we can also make some other adjustments. Like we can adjust this Foreground recovery using this slider. If we move this slider to the right then the edges will be cleaner. You can use this Foreground recovery as per your need for cleaning edges. Another thing is: When cleaning background if you see the foreground has become transparent like this then we can use this green brush which is called Keep brush. After selecting this brush we can drag like this to correct these areas. When completed we will click OK. So here is the result in a new layer. So, now we will erase the backgrounds from both sides using the Pen tool. So, we properly removed the background. Now, if we set a solid color background we can see if there is anything left of the background. Everything is fine. So, now we can set our subject to a new background. We can drag and drop it here. So this is the final result if we see it in closer view. We can get a lot better result if it wasn't a background like this and instead it was a solid color background and that color is completely different than the hair color. In that case, you could get much better result. Actually, in that case sometimes you even do it using the Background eraser tool. But when the background color and hair color are quite similar then it becomes difficult and the result will not be that good. So in this way, you can remove the background of a portrait image with proper hair masking and set it to another background. One more thing we can do here is: we can convert this background layer to a smart object and then apply some blur effect to it. Applying just a little bit of blur so that it doesn't look that sharp. So, that's all for this lesson. If you like this video then you can give a thumbs up, share it and subscribe to this channel for more videos like this. See you in the next project. Thanks for watching.