CLEAN-CUTTING IMAGES

This tutorial will show you how to clean cut an image, in order to paste it onto another background and make it look great.

I start out with my image of Sarah Shahi here.
Then I select the magnetic lasso tool

(right click on the lasso tool and select or press shift + l twice), I pick a starting point and I then carefully drag it all the way around the edge of Sarah until I reach my starting point again.

Ofcourse, this isn't going to be completely accurate, so I then pick the normal lasso tool and I zoom in on my image so I can see the edge clearly, and I then press either 'shift' to increase the lasso or 'alt' to decrease it. I work my way around the edge of my image this way, and correct the lasso I made around Sarah so that it's as close to the edge of her as possible.

When I'm satisfied with how the lasso looks, I press 'ctrl + alt + d' (Select > Feather) and set the radius to 1.

It should now look like this:

So, because I usually like to work with layer masks instead of just deleting the background, I add a layer mask and the background erases automatically.


It all looks good now, but as the background is now white, I can't really see the fine details around the edge. So I add a new layer, move it to the bottom and fill it with a dark blue color. Any dark color will work but sometimes you need to use a light color, it all depends on the previous background of your image.
Anyway, now I can see that my image is quite rough around the edges so I pick my eraser tool and choose a soft round brush, normally it needs to be around 5px.
I usually work with the opacity just under or just over 50% but it's really all about what you feel works best.
These are the settings I use:

I now carefully work my way around the edge of my image, erasing the parts I don't want.

Be really careful erasing the edge, if you erase too much somewhere it can make it look very strange and it can alter the whole look of the image if you for instance erase part of the arm so it's uneven. The good thing about layer masks though, is that if you erase too much you can always get it back.
So when I'm done it looks like this:

As you can see, the old background is still showing under Sarah's arm, so I just repeat everything I just did, to that little part.
And now, my image is ready for me to work with. I apply a pattern to the background but what you do with it is totally up to you.
My end result:


If you have any feedback or questions about this tutorial, you can email me at: line@escaping-madness.net.