JokoRB’s Photoshop Site

When working with portraits, we oftenly need to erase background of an object such as
erase background from haired picture and then change the background into something else.

I have a technique for doing this, and I have been using it since 2005. That year, I work for photograph studio in Makassar, Indonesia,
found that the most of photographs’ background must be changed into landscapes, abstracts, or others. By reading on internet, I knew best way
to do this was by using white screen (we used thick white paper) as studio background, and gave enough light to obtain really white screen.

When imported and edited within Photoshop, I used “multiply technique” – I don’t know how has named it, but it really uses multiply blending to work.

Let’s see how it works:
1. Open an image – portraits should give better result.

2. Retune colors until the background become white and skintone become natural.

3. Double click layer Background (it should be the only layer). Name it object, click OK.

4. Right click the layer “object” and duplicate it. Now we have two layers, “object” and “object copy”.

5. Change the lower layer, the “object” layer’s blending mode to Multiply.

6. Add a picture and make it the bottom-most layer, which will be the new background.
7. Select the top-most layer and apply layer mask to this layer.

8. We can now start to erase the background of the top-most layer (in masking mode). Don’t erase white object other than background.
9. See detailed at red-marked parts. We can use layer-mask, black forecolor and white backcolor, then use brush tool to paint around the hair.

10. As you can see, this method works perfectly

For your notice, this technique works good on white down to light-gray canvas, but not various-colored canvas. Other time, we will discuss other techniques
for other cases. Keep reading