Transcript:
In this video, we’re gonna take those pesky little selection Edge fringe thingies that look like this, and we’re gonna make them look like this, But with a couple of three different ways to do because not one always works for everything. Folks, My name is Mac Laskowski. Welcome to the latest video. This is a free bonus video for my Photoshop compositing course. If you want to grab the photos, I’m using just check below the video. Check the description. Look down there somewhere below. You will see a place to download those photos. Okay, so let’s go ahead and dive in and get started here. So what I have here is that I’ve actually got. I’ve got a document open, so I’ve got my background. One of the things that I do is I place I place the subject on top of the backgrounds as soon as possible, and you’re gonna see why in a second here once we get into the selection because I don’t want to do. I must we’ll get them in their background, so I can see how my selections gonna look as I as I start to work. Then the only other thing that I did ahead of time here is I went and grabbed my quick selection tool, hit the right bracket key, so I had a larger, larger brush here and I went and kind of just painted in and out loading lined everything inside of there, and then this is what took a few minutes and that’s why I’m kind of sparing you from the tediousness of it is. I zoomed in commander control. + Hit the left bracket key made the brush a little bit smaller And I’ll go in and Ill. Just try to get every little edge that I possibly can, okay. I use the spacebar key. Press Spacebar gives you a little hand Grabber. Move that around paint in on some of those edges. If I missed anything and I’ll just try to get in there and get as close as I can because it’s easier to do all of that work now. Okay, so and for those of you, that always say. Hey, you always used a perfect background. Obviously as you can see here. This is not a perfect background, so I tried to make it perfect, but there just wasn’t enough sheet, and there wasn’t enough space to go in there and pull it off. But but that’s the process. That’s the the beginning of the process of a composite and whether it’s a person place thing. Tree’s hair, a cup. Whatever it happened to a dog, that’s that’s kind of the start of this, okay. Just take that quick selection tool it make your first outline. It doesn’t have to be perfect yet, especially if there’s hair, you don’t even worry about hair At this point. Now the next part we’re going to go up here to the top and we’re going to go to the select and mask dialog box. It’s going to open up the the the place where we do. You know, any refining that we have for this, and here’s the key, so the reason why? I put this this this layer into the document first. It’s because you might see onion skin as your choice up here or marching ants, which doesn’t help us The right overlay doesn’t help us black or white could help us, But the problem is is we don’t know you have to. You have to get your subject onto their background if I were to put this subject on a bright background. I’m done, they look great. I don’t have any D fringing to do. We could be. We could be done here if I were to put them on a black background. It could have a lot of work to do so. We don’t want to do work that we don’t have to do, so that’s why. I choose on layers, Because now I can see exactly what they look like on their document. I don’t have any guessing to do, and I’m not gonna do any extra work, so I choose on layers. I usually put a radius up about one or two pixels here that’ll just kind of smooth and refine the edge a little bit and kind of just smooth out the the selection that you made, but here’s the here’s the problem, so we will zoom in if they had hair. I will go in here with the refine brush and many of the projects in my Photoshop compositing course have hair, but rather than then do a 25-minute video for you here. I wanted to concentrate on the edge fringe, but I’d go along here and kind of just refine the edge. I’d paint on any places that have Haring as I go through here and you’ll start to see some of that appear. That’s step number one step number two. Is we go down here and we see. We have a fringe. Alright, so we have a fringe. Oh, sorry! I got my my rotating document on here. I got to turn that off. Um, we’ve got a little edge friends down there. Well, the easy way to get rid of it will call this method number one easy way to get rid of it. Decontaminate colors. See a little checkbox right down here. I can turn that on, it’s gone. Try all right, my first suggestion. I talk about this a lot. I like to give you a repertoire. You build this repertoire of things to do so in that repertoire becomes. Try this, it’s the easiest way to go problem is and I picked the photo. I made sure I picked the photo. It didn’t work with problem is is sometimes it will leave. You see that pixelated edge. It’s just something’s not right there, Okay, It just gets blocky and pixelated and solid. There’s no edge to it and especially around hair. It can really ruin the places around hair. So unfortunately, we can’t do that. If you want to know a little bit about what’s going on behind the scenes, if you look under output -, it’s actually forcing us to go to a new layer and so what it does is it makes a copy of her image, a new layer with the layer mask, but the really interesting thing is is if you delete that layer mask, that’s on that new layer. You will see. It actually went into the layer and permanent, and it did that to the edge and it really restricts what were able to do with the photo later on – if we ever need it to refine that edge. So that’s why that method doesn’t always work. Give it a try. If it looks good, go with it, it’s fast and it’s easy, but in this case, it didn’t work so what we’re going to do is we are gonna go and turn that off. We’re gonna output this to a layer mask click. OK, and so now we’ve got our document on the hair. I’ll back out for you. We can see everything I so Photoshop. Has this little you can kind of use your touchpad and you can see here. I can rotate around and it’s probably my nemesis as far as everything here because I hate when it gets rotated, so I need to go back in there and turn it off anyway. You’ll see that we have a little a little fringe going around there. And by the way in case, you haven’t noticed. I’m not the kind of guy that really cuts out my little mess-ups in there and I bring that up for a good reason. Something I did very different in my Photoshop compositing courses. I left a lot of the failures in there because I think it’s such an essential tool. If you all you see is perfection every single time you watch a tutorial You’re like, Hey, everybody’s perfect than that. Well, how come mine doesn’t ever look like that, so I actually walked through a lot of failures. Something I can’t do in a book or magazine or even in a blog article. I walk through a lot of failures, youll. Watch me screw up. And then you’ll hear me say, all right, Well, that doesn’t look good. Why doesn’t it look good? What do we do instead? So you’ll actually see a lot of things that that I thought would work that. Don’t work anyway. We got our fringe now. Method number. We’ll call this 1.5 I’m not even going to count it. As one of the the three methods we could zoom in press B for your brush tool, set the foreground color to black, and we have our layer mask over here and we could painstakingly paint around that little edge and try to get rid of it with our layer mask. Okay, so not my favorite way to do it. It takes a long time, but I’m not saying you won’t to end up there. There might be times and places in your photos where you do end up doing that, but we’re gonna try to make this a little bit easier. The second way involves us to do something a little bit destructive to the photo where we have to take it off the layer mask. Let me show you what? I mean, so if I go up here and I click on my layer and I go up here to the layer menu. You’re gonna see some of these matting settings down here, and you’re seeing color, decontaminate, defringe. We’ll, number one color, decontaminate. It does the same thing that the check box did back in the and the other dialog box. So that’s not an option. Defringe works really good, but the problem is, and let’s zoom in just so here. Oh, and cancel out of that. I’ll zoom in just so you can see. I can go layer matting defringe. I’ll do one pixel, which is what I usually do and nothing happens. And that’s because the layer has a layer mask and so if that feature doesn’t work with the layer with the layer mask, so we have to take our subject off onto its own layer, so what? I’ll do on a commander control. Click on the layer mask here. It’s going to put a selection around that layer then. I’m gonna go click on the layer thumbnail and press command J on the Mac or Ctrl J on the PC, And that pushes this guy up onto its own layer. We can hide the layer below because now we don’t need it. It is not on a layer mask. I’m ok with that. I’m not the person that insists on working on layer masks all the time they have their place, but sometimes it’s it’s okay to get it off, especially when you feel comfortable that you’ve done your selection as far as you can go so now, let’s zoom in here and take a look down here, so we can see our fringe. We’re gonna go up here to layer matting defringe. I’ll try one pixel. If one pixel doesn’t work, I try to, but let’s give it a try. Bam, look at that. That’s before after before after pretty cool, so it goes in there and it gets rid of that fringe all the way around the whole thing. So think of that as method number two works really good. In fact, that’s that’s probably my go-to method the the most time. That’s that’s what I find myself using the most. Alright, lets let’s undo here back up and let’s get into method number. Three method number three is one. I stumbled on probably seven years ago. Its call it the inner glow method, and I literally did stumble on it and it. It’ll, it’ll save you a lot of times if nothing else works and you get those fringes. I’m actually going to show you an example on wispy hair, too, but what we do is we’ll zoom in on our subject again and we’re gonna double Click this layer, but open up our layer style dialog. I’m gonna click on inner glow. Now you might see different settings here. You might yours might be set to ye in different blend modes and whatnot. So what I can say is if if you have a white fringe, you want to counteract it, so you want to make sure you set your blend mode to multiply and then you’re gonna go to your color picker and then just go Click on an edge near the skin click. OK, and you’ll see it gets rid of the fringe now. Depending on the size you have it set to. You’ll see it creeps in further and further. So you have to be careful so you might not want to go up that. Hi with it. Alright, keep a lower size setting, and you can always come in here and you can adjust the opacity of that as well, so that’s before, and then that’s after, okay, So that is an option, okay. It works really good. I actually like the madding option Better on this photo, but I do want to show you a photo where I think you’ll you’ll. You’ll kind of agree with me on this one. So here we have here we’ve got, and I’m gonna I would never. I would never put this on a black background, but I’m gonna make it hard. I’m gonna make it hard on ourselves, so let’s go add a layer here and I will fill that layer with black again. It’s it’s a bright sunny photo and it’s it’s dark black as moody. You would never mix the two together because you would never get a successful composite from that, but I’ll do it like like just so we can see what this does. I’m gonna go over here. I’m gonna double Click the layer and let’s go over here to inner glow, and I’m really paying attention to the hair because we know the matting method and brushes and whatnot will work on on the the edge of the skin. The hair is usually what we’re most concerned with because that’s where we see the biggest problems, so just look at it. I mean, and even do anything. Lf the settings from the last photo, what we could go over here and click and again adjust your size. Adjust your opacity. But that is a huge one. If you ever find, you can’t get rid of the fringes around people’s hair. Okay, now, method number three. I’m actually gonna leave this one open because I didn’t really have it on the last one because there was no wispy. Hair is you will see little sometimes chunks of Fringe left inside the hair or could be on the edges of the hair. I can see actually a little bit of it. It’s actually a little bit of it over here and a little bit over here. Method number. Three is the burn tool. Okay, we’re gonna go over to the tool box. You can press the letter. O, it’s located right, under the Dodge Tool. We go to the burn tool. I use mid-tones and I set the exposure to about 20% and then go make sure you click on your layer, not the layer mask or anything, And then all I do is I go in here and I burn it away. If it’s dark hair, we use burn if it were bright hair, bright hair with something darker on the fringe that I would use dodge or even not even hair, but trees. Whatever your subject is, if it were a darker friends, I would use the opposite. I’d use the Dodge tool, but we go in here and we burn those little edges away, and that’s what helps them mix and fit into that dark backgrounds. A little bit more, Okay, and also you can experiment. I used mid-tone’s on this photo. You can also experiment with the shadows options. Sometimes that one will work pretty good as well. Well, folks. I do hope you will check out my Photoshop compositing course. You can find out more over at Matt. K com slash compositing. You can also download the images here if you want to try this out on your own. Thanks for watching and. I’ll talk to you again real soon.