Transcript:
In this video, I’m going to show you how to easily remove a green screen background in Photoshop start by selecting your green screen layer. The first step is to make a selection out of the green screen so that we can mask it out. There’s a lot of ways to do that in Photoshop, you can use the quick actions to remove the background by using artificial intelligence, But I find that with green screen, an older tool actually does a better job, so go into the select menu and select color range. The color range allows you to select specific colors and it does a fantastic job with green screens. Make sure that you have sample colors selected from the drop down, then enable the eyedropper tool and click over the green screen. You’ll notice in the preview window that Photoshop will select these areas. Obviously, that’s not selecting the entire green screen. You need to select similar greens to do so. You can hold the shift key and click and drag over the rest of the green screen to add to that selection like so, you can also select the eyedropper with the plus icon on it, but I prefer just using the keyboard shortcut at this point. We’re going to invert the selection because we want to select her and not the green screen also. I noticed that I missed an area here on the bottom, so I’m going to hold shift and click and drag to add to my selection. You can also get an actual preview of what you’re selecting with the image to do so. Click on the image icon and from selection preview select either black, matte or white matte. I think that in this case, the black matte gives you a better representation of the selection. Also, I would like to point out that you don’t have to make a perfect selection out of her hair. At this moment, we’re gonna work with it in a later. Step, so for now. This is a fantastic selection, so I’ll press OK? And Photoshop will create a selection around my model and by the way. If you see something in this tutorial that you enjoy or that will help you in your projects make sure to click on that like button. It really helps out the channel with the Youtube algorithm. So I really would appreciate it if you did. Next I’m going to click on the layer mask icon to create a layer mask based on that selection and that removes the background. What we’re going to do now is fine. Tune this image so that it looks a lot more realistic with this background. You don’t need to follow this step, but I’m going to create a solid color fill layer above my background so that you can better see the adjustments that I’m making next. I’m going to select the layer mask and we’re going to adjust the mask edges, and if you haven’t seen my tutorial on my two-step process for removing backgrounds, then I recommend watching it. I’m gonna use it in this video, but I’ll go through it fairly quickly. If you want more details, watch that video. I’ll place a link to it below in the description. Next click on the selected mask button from the properties panel to bring up the selected mask workspace, which will allow you to fine tune the mask edges under view. I’m going to select on black because again. I think on black gives me a better representation of what my mask looks like, and we’re first going to adjust the edges around our model’s body. Not her hair again. We’re going to work with the hair in a later step, so we’re going to use the global refinement sliders to fine tune this edge notice that the edge is a bit jagged, so I’m going to smooth it out by dragging the smooth slider to the right that smooths out my edge. It looks much much better, then I can increase the contrast to sharpen the edge and I can shift the edge inwards, just a little bit, and that will not remove the fringe the halo around the layer, but that’s okay, we’re going to fix that next. I’ll press OK? And those adjustments are applied to my mask next. Let’s select the brush tool and you can paint with white or black on the layer mask to hide or reveal pixels black hides, so I’ll set my foreground color to black, so I can hide this imperfection, and I can hold the space bar and pan around to see what other areas I can adjust in this case. Everything looks good for now. We may need to adjust things later, but for now. This is good, so I’ll double Click on the hand tool and fit the image to screen next. I’ll remove the edge halos, and I’ll use one of my favorite filters for that. Go into filter other and minimum, the minimum filter allows you to contract a mask based on a number of pixels. I’m going to select roundness because I’m working with a person. And, of course, Squaredness wouldn’t be the best option for that, and I can adjust the radius accordingly to contract the mask and remove the fringing. I think that this is a pretty good radius 1.4 and Ill press, OK? If I zoom in, you can see that my fringing is now gone. I’ll double click on the hand tool to fit the image to screen, and I know I’m going a little fast. So if you missed something, feel free to rewind. Also, if you want to learn more about the minimum filter, I have a tutorial that talks all about it. I’ll place a link to it below in the description, and now it’s time to work on the hair and we’re going to go back into the selected mask workspace for that, so with the mask selected, click on select mask next, I’m going to use the refine edge tool. If you’re in an older version of Photoshop, you will have to do this manually, so you will have to paint over the hair like so so that Photoshop could remove the green screen and newer versions of Photoshop 2021 and newer you have this option called refine hair where Photoshop will do it automatically And let me actually show you What’s going on behind the scenes. If you click on show edge, you can see that when I paint. Photoshop focuses on these specific areas to make the background removal. If I disable this, you can see that those areas were adjusted, and if I continue painting, Photoshop will, of course, continue adjusting those areas but in Photoshop 2021 and newer, you don’t have to do it by hand, simply click on refine hair and Photoshop will use artificial intelligence to find the hair in the image and paint it for you automatically. If Photoshop missed the spot, you can always paint those areas in so in my case. Photoshop did a really good job. It might have missed a couple areas here on the edges, so I’ll just help out Photoshop just a little bit by painting over these areas like so, but overall, it did a great job, so i’ll uncheck show edge and you can see the result and maybe I can paint on this area as well to remove the green from those hair strands. This is looking fantastic, so I’ll press OK? And Photoshop makes that adjustment. Now it’s time to fine tune this result and we’re going to use an adjustment layer to remove the green, so I’m going to go into the new adjustment layer icon and select hue and saturation from the hue and saturation adjustment layer. We can shift the hues of this green to something else so that they’re not noticeable. I’m going to click on this icon to clip it to the layer below so that this adjustment layer only affects our model layer. I’ll reset it and from the master drop down, I’ll select greens from here. I can decrease the saturation so that it’s obvious when I’m targeting the greens on this image, it looks like the default settings didn’t quite get the green on this green screen, so I can click and drag on these sliders to add these shades of green and you can see the green disappears, Which is exactly what I want. Next I’m going to increase the saturation again. You don’t have to go back to zero as long as you have some saturation, and I’ll change the green edges to a different color by dragging on the hue slider until I find the hue that more or less matches her hair color. It looks like I was a little heavy-handed with these sliders, so let me just click and drag this over to the right to make sure that I’m only selecting those greens and not our skin tone or anything else and just keep fine-tuning the hue slider until you get something that looks like this before, and after I think it’s looking great, Let me know what you think in the comments next. I’m going to show you how to fix the hair strands, but before I do that, I’m going to disable the color fill layer and we’re going to paint in areas that Photoshop missed like the top of our head here, so I’ll select the layer mask and I’m going to paint with white to reveal. I’m going to tap on the right bracket key to increase my brush size and just paint over these areas, and also it looks like Photoshop missed a bit of her hair and the reason that we did the human saturation adjustment layer is so that if we go over the line, that’s okay, you can still see some of that brown, and it doesn’t look green, so it gives us a little more flexibility. So what I’m doing now is just making sure that all these highlights that Photoshop hid from her hair are showing again, so I’m painting with white on the layer mask to reveal those highlights, and obviously you can spend a bit more time in your image, Fine tuning these details, but in this case, this is good enough next. Let’s bring back the flyaway hair that we lost to the masking process. We’ll create a new layer for that, and I’ll call this layer hair and Ill press ctrl alt G on Windows Command option G on the Mac to clip it to the layer below and what I’ll do is hold alt on windows option on the mac, with the brush tool selected to temporarily enable the eyedropper tool and I can select one of the darker colors found in her hair and I can paint over the mask edge to reveal these flyaway hairs, and I’ll increase my brush size by tapping on the right bracket key on the keyboard, and I’ll continue painting as you can see. Photoshop is doing a fantastic job. If you accidentally paint inside the image, that’s okay. You can erase by holding the tilde key. That’s the key below the escape key to the left of the number one in North American keyboards and you can click and drag to erase or you can select the eraser tool from the toolbar, of course, but continue painting over the layer to get those details back in. And this is my result after spending just a few minutes fine tuning the mask using the same techniques. I showed you a moment ago. Let me know what you think in the comments. And if you learned something, make sure that you click on that thumbs up button. Also if this is your first time at the Photoshop training channel. Make sure that you click on that subscribe and notification button so that you don’t miss any future Photoshop tutorials? My name is Jesus Ramirez. Thank you so much for joining me. I look forward to speaking to you again very soon.