Portrait Pro Background Removal Tutorials
This tutorial is written to assist you in removing the unwanted backgrounds from your digital photos, so that you can place them on a Portrait Pro Digital Background.
Because there are so many different photo editing software packages available, it is almost impossible to write a tutorial for all of them. Therefore, this tutorial will cover the procedures needed to extract the background using Gimp Photo Editor Software. Gimp is included on the Portrait Pro Digital Backgrounds DVD.
Other tutorials can be found below:
There are a couple of ways to erase photograph backgrounds while leaving only the desired object:
Using the eraser tools
Erasing everything surrounding your object is the most time-consuming way of getting rid of a background. To do this in the GIMP, double-click the Eraser tool (the pink eraser icon) and select a brush size. Use a big round circle brush to erase a lot; use a small circle for fine work. Move over to the image and begin erasing around the perimeter of the object that you want to keep. Zoom (under the View menu) the image in for detailed work and out to see how the overall image will appear.
Go all around the outside of the object, creating a buffer zone. Remember, click to erase, move, click to erase, and so on. After you've completed erasing the buffer zone you can switch to a larger brush and erase the rest of the background.
A good way to control what gets erased is to move the mouse over what you want to erase and make a single click. If you erase more than you want, use the Undo command under the Edit menu. Don't hold down the left button and move the mouse at the same time unless you want to erase in a line or over large areas. If you erase around your object this way and your hand slips, you'll have to Undo and re-erase a bunch of pixels.
If the whole process sounds pretty tedious, well, it is. That's why graphics professional rely more on a technique called masking.
Masking the background
Masking is sort of the inverse of erasing. It's a little less tedious too but it can give you high-quality results if you take your time and are careful.
Think of masking as putting a sheet of translucent paper over your image and then etching out just your object. You create a mask where your object peeks through the paper. Once you've masked your object, you turn the rest of the image into a transparent background. Here's how you do it in the GIMP.
Go to the Select Tab and choose Toggle Quickmask. A red "mask" will cover your image. Click the Eraser tool and erase the parts of the mask necessary to reveal the object you want to keep. Your object will "get clear" as you remove the mask. If you go outside the lines of your object, click Select and then Invert, then click Select, Toggle Quickmask, and use the eraser again to "put back" the mask. Flip back and forth using the Toggle Quickmask and erasing until only your object is clearly visible. You can try different brush sizes to aid in fine detail, and zoom in or out to help you see what you're doing. Use the Undo feature and single mouse-click erasing to minimize mistakes.
Finish up with one last Select and Toggle Mask sequence. You'll see the "marching ants" animated border around your object and the red mask disappear. Under the Edit tab choose Copy to grab your object. Move over to the Layers dialog and create a new layer with a transparent background, using the page icon all the way to the left of the garbage can icon. Click on the new layer (called Empty Layer) and under the Edit tab select Paste to put your object on a pasted layer.
Click the Pasted layer, then right-click and select Anchor Layer to anchor the pasted layer to the empty layer. Your object should appear on the Empty layer thumbnail graphic. If the gray and black checkerboard appears on the thumbnail in the shape of your object, you've copied the green screen background by mistake. Grabbing the object that's masked can be a little tricky, and it's easy to invert your selection. Undo the steps back through the copy command, or you'll loose your masked object. Under the Selection tab, choose Invert, and do the copy to new empty/pasted layer sequence again. When you have your object in place (on the empty layer), click on the Background layer and delete it.
You should be left with just your object and on transparent background. Save the file, answering yes if you're asked to flatten the image, because JPEG files can't have transparent layers. You can now insert the file into any other type of graphics file.