 Hey everybody it's Craig back to here and in this video I'm going to show you how to extract your subject from the background and then change that background to any color you like. All right let's get started. All right so here we are looking at an image that was shot on the Nikon D810 on the 85mm with an Einstein strobe with a 35 inch Westcon Zeppelin and that was camera right. All right so we had that background layer there you can see bottom right. What we want to do is duplicate that layer so we don't affect the background layer. The shortcut in Mac and the Photoshop is Command J. So if I hit Command J on my keyboard on the Mac it creates a duplicate layer. I don't know what that is on PC it might be control someone just maybe type below in the comments if you know what that shortcut is. All right so let's go over and extract this. So you can see over here on the upper left here we have a choice quick selection tool magic wand we're going to choose the magic wand tool. Now command minus to zoom out. Now I want to click on this background so I've clicked on this background you can see right now and it's not a complete selection so I hold down the shift key and click again and you can see we've got that left side now between the feathers again I'm holding the shift and I'm clicking and on the right same thing holding shift clicking click here click here and then you can see it looks like I've got almost everything selected. Now this is going to vary depending on your image if you have a white background it's going to be easier if you have a busier background you may want to use the pen tool for that. Now the next thing we want to do is we want to invert this selection so you go up to select and choose inverse you can see here the shortcut is shift command i on the mac I'm going to click there now you can't really see that much of a change but if I come up to select and mask if I click on that now you'll see a red background now you can change the background depending on what you want so you can change the color by clicking here or you can click here you can see there's different options onion skin margarine we're on overlay and we're at opacity of 100 now I can look at this and this should tell me if it's a pretty good cut out and it looks pretty decent I think we can refine it a bit if you go up to the upper left second brush down click on that then click on the inside of the image and then we're just going to paint around the hair and we just want to make sure that we have a clear cut out with the hair because that's usually a dead giveaway if that's not right so we're just going to click on that we're going to refine that a bit and that's good enough for us right now so we're going to do if you look to the right it says edge detection radius of one pixel and then also we have new layer with layer mask we're going to click okay and you'll see this open up and now you can see we have the original image but we have a mask on the right now you don't see the clear background because we have the background layer on if you click that eyeball off you can see now it's just clear it said the logo didn't come out right away so what we can do so we click on that mask if we use black and paint over that that'll clear that up so if you look to the left you can see white and black and I'm toggling back and forth I'm doing that with the x key so we want black on top we want to hit b for a shortcut for the brush key opacity 100 flow 100 I'm going to paint over that logo and now that's gone so you can also use this brush to sort of tidy up anything that may not have worked properly all right so the next step is we want to change the background color so there's a couple different ways that you can do that I'll show you one right here if you click down here at the bottom it's a little circle shape and you click on solid color now you can see this is our solid color color picker we can choose a blue and then we could just sort of slide down kind of like that color I'm going to say okay so now that's all we see so we have to take this color fill one layer and drag it below our subject so now that's our background color if we want to change that background color we can double click here again and we could just pull this down or we could move that around for different saturation different darkness so whatever we want to do we can change that quite easily so we'll go to the blue we'll click okay now to make this look a little more realistic what we can do we come down here again is use a hue saturation layer now once we put that on top of that what we can do is we can take some of the saturation out of that we can drag the lightness down and you can see it's made it look a little more realistic because if we turn these layers off and we put the background layer on you can see there's a bit of a natural vignetting happening so we want to kind of duplicate that to make this look a little more natural except we're not quite there so we're going to add a vignette to this so how we can do that is if you come up to the elliptical tool here you can see we have our rectangular it's the elliptical marquee tool we click on that and we drag this over the image now we can pick this up and we can move it around so we put it in position here now what we have to do is we have to fill that background layer now the easiest way to do that is if you look over the left we have our black and white with the toggling of the x key we put the black on the background if we do that and hit command delete on the mac that's going to fill that background right there now what we can do too is we can go to our properties so if I click on the properties you can see we see the properties here of the hues saturation layer if I click on the mask you can see now we have a feather tool if you don't see this if you go up to window make sure that you've got properties checked and then you'll see this now what I can do is I can feather this background and you can see how that's sort of softening that creating that vignette appearance so let's say we go up to around 155 and that's just sort of a subtle vignette I'll just close this now to get rid of that marching ant circle command D and that will deselect that so you can see right now we toggle that on and off it's added a bit of a vignette now if you feel that that's too much what you can do is you can double click on the hues saturation and you can just back off on this lightness so you could see if I go to the right it becomes sort of white and then if I go here it becomes darker so just play around with that lightness slider bring in that subtle vignette maybe adjust your saturation and then you can change that to any color so really let's just recap quickly you have your duplicate layer and that what you want to do with that is you want to cut out your background using the magic wand tool which is up here once you cut out your background then you'll have something that looks like this you can add your solid color and then you can change that by double clicking right there to any color you want or just sort of dragging and sliding there we have a very unattractive green there we have a purple and then to make this look a little more realistic what you can do is bring in a hues saturation layer and then you can take some of the saturation out of that you can also bring the darkness down and then just add a little mask to make that vignette type appearance I'm really not liking that purple let's switch that it's not as nice as that blue so here we go we have the blue background but you can easily extract your subject using the magic wand tool and change the color of your background anyway I hope you enjoyed this video if you're not already a subscriber just click on subscribe right now I put out two videos a week you'll get a notice for that also if you like this video hit that like button and also click on share and you can share this video on the web with your fellow photographers all right thanks for watching this video if you have any questions or comments you can post them down below this video all right thanks again for watching and I'll see you in the next video