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[ 25 ]Step One: In this exercise, we’ll use a studio athlete
shot I found on Adobe Stock. If you’d like to down-
load the low-res watermarked version of this image to
follow along, c lick this link, log in with your Adobe
ID, and c lick the Save to Library button. Double-c lick
the image in the Libraries panel (Window>Libraries) to
open it in Photoshop. To make it easier to work with
the image, increase the resolution of the practice file.
(We normally don’t recommend enlarging images, but
this is only for practice purposes.) Go to Image>Image
Size, turn on the Resample checkbox, select Preserve
Details 2.0 from the Resample drop-down menu, set
the Width to 2,400 pixels, and c lick OK.
Because the subject is on a mostly solid background,
it will be easy work for the Select Subject feature. Go
under the Select menu and choose Subject. Done! Well,
not completely, but you can see it did 99% of the work!
This an impressive selection feature in Photoshop and is
really effective on images with simple backgrounds, but
it also works on a variety of backgrounds. This feature
is definitely worth experimenting with.
Step Two: Zoom in on the image to look for any areas
that were missed or perhaps selected too much. Keep
in mind that for our purposes, we don’t need to be
precise with the selection around the subject’s exposed
skin areas and hair since those areas are going to be
eliminated anyway.
Just use the Lasso tool (L) to edit the selection: hold
down Option (PC: Alt) to remove a selected area, and
Shift to add to it. Work your way around the entire sub-
ject. Here I noticed the area inside the shoelace wasn’t
fully selected. Since this is inside the original selection,
hold down the Option (PC: Alt) key and c lick-and-drag
around the area to remove it.Step Three: To check the overall selection, c lick on
the Select and Mask button in the Options Bar to open
the Select and Mask workspace. By default, the View is
set to Onion Skin with a Transparency slider below it in
the Properties panel. Set the Transparency to 100% so
you can see the image extracted from the background
before you commit. Even though everything looks good,
set the Edge Detection Radius to just 1 px to clean up
the edges a bit more, and c lick OK. Press Command-J
(PC: Ctrl-J) to copy the selected subject to a new layer.
Also, turn off the Background layer for now by c licking
its Eye icon in the Layers panel.©Adobe Stock/Romario Ien