 Hey everybody it's Greg back to here and in this video I'm going to show you how to quickly change your background in Photoshop and also how to make the hair blend nicely. All right let's get started. So okay here we are on our background image. Now why this works so well is we're going to use something called the overlay blend mode and it works best if you have the 50% gray background not quite 50% gray here but we're going to see how it works. First thing you want to do is bring in an alternate background. You could try a site like Pexels on the web so I downloaded this from there so command a command c I'm copying this and I'm going to paste it command v so these are commands for the Mac. Now command minus to zoom out and command t creates this selection around the image. If I hold the shift key I can just drag this and it'll stay proportionate. So command t holding the shift key down I can drag this around and I can move it. So you can see that covers the image and then I hit enter. So now we just see the background. So in order to punch a hole through this what we need to do is go to our blend modes and go to overlay and now you can see that that's blending. Now all we have to do is create a mask and then paint over our subject. So if I hold down the option key on the Mac I come down here to the bottom I click on there and now I have a mask. So what I want to do is click on that mask and paint over it with a white brush. I'm going to hit the b key it's a shortcut. I'll start with about a opacity of 100 a flow of 29 on a white brush. Now also too if I hold the control or the option key and I drag left and right my brush gets bigger smaller. If I go up it's softer down it's harder so I'm going to use a soft brush. I'll go with about here. Now I've done the wrong thing x I want to paint that off. What I want to do is sort of bring in the background first. So I'm going to use the white over here. So x for white you can see that toggles on the left x I'm going to toggle with white and then I'm going to bring that in. So also I can use my bracket keys adjust the size of my brush. So I'll get close to my subject here and then we'll get in a little tighter. But you can see here now I'm just bringing in the background. So we get closer I'll just make my brush smaller and then what I'll do too is I'll zoom in to just sort of refine things so that we don't paint over our subject. But if we do we can always just paint back because we have a mask. All right so I'm just going to zoom in now just so you can see a little better here and what I'll do is I'll make my brush smaller once again with my bracket keys and also show you that other shortcut. So we'll just get to the edge of the hair because how this works is if you see the hair there it just sort of blends but we don't want to go over any more than we have to so we don't want to go too much into the hair but we just want to take those edges that are often hard to cut out from an image and just let them sort of overlay this mode and you can see how it's blending quite nicely with the hair there. So we're just going to go along the edges here with this brush and then we'll refine this mask a little bit. I'll just go quickly because you're getting the idea of how this works. So this works perfect on a 50% gray layer so the key to using this technique obviously is to shoot on a gray background. If your question is well what if I didn't shoot on a gray background well then it's going to be a lot harder. So in the future plan to shoot on a gray background and then you can use this technique. So often I'll shoot on a gray background I don't know if I'm going to add a texture later but if I want to then I've got the right background color so that's why I sometimes shoot on gray and so I recommend you do that. So you can find gray paper at a photography store or online and just look for something that will get you about 50% gray for your background. So you can see here this is looking pretty good. It's blending quite nicely here you can see how the hair kind of punches through there and then here as well as we go along the edges you can see how the hair is still visible yet this was quite an easy technique. Now if you want to look at your mask a little better hold the option key click on the mask right there and then you could see here that I made a bit of a mistake so let me just fix that I had a little white there we can zoom out and this is our mask and then here I could just make my brush bigger wrong color and then I could just fix this up right here just make sure that this is all kind of the same right here and so you click option or alt on the pc to see the mask you got to click on the mask layer again I hover over the mask layer holding option or alt on the pc and boom we kicked right through it all right so now if I wanted to I can change the color of this as well so I can sort of blend another tone with this or I can reduce the opacity so if you thought your background looked a little fake you just sort of take that down and then you've got this sort of faded gray kind of look I kind of like it around 80% I think it looks pretty good to me around that what I can do is create a solid layer coming down here click solid layer I'm going to pick a blue because blue is opposite skin tones so I'm going to click on that and again I just go overlay and then you'll see that we have our subject she's covered in blue we hold the option key on the mac alt on the pc click on the mask a layer one you can drag that up and you can create a mask right there now she has a mask now if you want it to take this down what we could do is click down here and create a curves layer and we could drag this down now that's sort of darkened the whole image so again what we can do is we could drag that mask up drag that mask up say yes and now she's the same brightness but if we toggle that on and off you could see the background's just gotten darker and again if you think the color fill is too much we could drag that down and we could just have a hint of blue there so you can adjust the opacity of the color you can adjust the opacity of the background and then you can also adjust the darkness or brightness after the fact with this curves layer making the background darker making the background brighter so that's kind of why I like using that curves layer for that now one last thing I want to show you is we're going to create a vignette for this image so what we can do is create a new layer and then you see on the left we have the black and the white if I put the black on the background and hit command delete on the mac now we've created a mask for that now what we can do is go to the elliptical tool right here and I just want to show you what that one is so there's some different tools here we want the elliptical marquee tool and then we can just drag like this and down and then we could place this over here and what we're going to do is we're going to create a mask now that's the first step now we want to change the background to white command delete we fill that delete one more time we've punched a hole through it the next step is to go to filter and we want to go to blur gaussian blur we're going to choose a pixel radius of 350 I'm going to say okay and what that'll do is it's going to blur and blend that and then command delete to get rid of that selection and then what we want to do is just drag our opacity so that didn't work quite the way I wanted it to but if I bring this opacity down it should blend a little bit better so something around 10 and then I click that on and off you can see we've got a little bit more of a vignette around our image so just to recap we started with just the background layer it looked like this then we brought in the background we switched to overlay mode we created a mask just by drawing on our subject we color tone that by putting a solid color then we added a curves layer and we just kept dragging our mask up so we didn't have to do it more than once and then we created a vignette anyway I hope you enjoyed this tutorial if you're not already a subscriber click on that subscribe button also if you see a little bell there click on that you'll be notified if I go live also click that like button and if you have any comments or questions just post them in the comment section below also if you found this video helpful please share it on the web in photography forums and facebook groups all right thanks again it's Craig back to here and thanks for watching this video I'll see you in the next one