The warmth of home lies in creating a free and relaxing space. The same is true for photographing children. Only in a home environment can the child's most natural and true state and rich expressions be shown. Many parents will take pictures of their children at home. But there are also disadvantages to shooting at home, that is, the background is unlikely to be as simple as in a photo studio, and the effect will certainly not be as good. For example, as shown in Figure 1, in order to capture my daughter's naughty "style", I almost sat on the ground and took this photo. I am quite satisfied with the expression, movements and composition, but the background environment is really too cluttered.
How to remove the messy background in photos of children with good expressions and replace them with backgrounds we like? Don’t worry, using Photoshop, with a few simple steps, we can "bring the child" into the fairy tale world and get a satisfactory photo (Figure 2). Moreover, the method introduced in this article is suitable for replacing most photos with cluttered backgrounds. Follow me below.
1. Choose background based on foreground
First, let’s analyze the photo in Figure 1. Although the main operations are to cut out the image and change the background, it should be noted that some parts of the protagonist’s face are covered by the quilt. This should be paid special attention to when choosing a background. When choosing a new background, you need to choose a material as soft as the quilt to create a more natural effect of the face sinking in. We can easily think of grass (Figure 3). This kind of posture and expression is probably more common sense only on grass.
2. Quickly blend with the background
First, we put the two pictures into one file, with the child picture on top and the grass on the bottom. Select the "Polygonal Lasso Tool" in the toolbox to roughly circle a selection area along the outline of the child. If you make a mistake in a certain step, you can press the "Backspace" key to go back. After encircling the selection range, execute "Select→Adjust Edges" and select black background mode (Figure 4). Adjust the Feather value to make the edges softer, and adjust the Shrink/Expand value to make the edges shrink inward, which will make it easier to produce a better blending effect.
After completing the edge adjustment of the selection, click the "Add Vector Mask" button in the Layers palette to add a mask to the layer, as shown in Figure 5, so that the grass in the background is displayed.
If you are not satisfied with the outline edge, you can further adjust it by opening the mask palette through "Window → Mask", in which you can further adjust the mask's concentration and feathering values. You can even enter the "Adjust Edge" dialog box just now through the "Mask Edge" button.
Although we have adjusted the edges of the mask, the combination of different positions, different definitions, different materials and backgrounds are still different, and the details need to be further modified to make the effect more natural. First, you need to bring up the channel palette through "Window → Channel" and select "Layer 1 Mask", which is the mask we just created. Select the brush tool and adjust the brush parameters. Set the main diameter to a larger value and the hardness to "0%" so that soft edges can better blend the image. Of course, this main diameter is constantly changing according to different drawing positions.
When working in the "Layer 1 Mask" state, the portion of the layer blocked by the mask will appear transparent red. The color control in the toolbox only displays black and white, and the brush can add and reduce the parts blocked by the mask by drawing black and white (Figure 6).
