- [Instructor] Replacing the background of a photo
is a common reason to use Photoshop with Lightroom Classic,
because it's something you can only do in Photoshop,
not in Lightroom.
So here in Lightroom Classic I have a couple of photos
and I could make some basic adjustments to these,
but I'm just going to go right ahead
and take them into Photoshop to combine them.
I'll click on the frame of one of these photos
and I'll hold down the Shift key and I'll click on another,
and then I'll go up to the photo menu
and I'll choose Edit In,
and this time I won't choose Edit in Adobe Photoshop,
instead I'll choose Open as Layers in Photoshop.
In Photoshop you can see that we now have one file
with two layers, each with one of those two images.
So what we want to do is to replace the background
of the image of the woman with the hat.
So the first step is to get the two images
approximately the same size.
I'll select the lower layer, the Lights layer,
and then I'll press Command + T on my keyboard,
that's Control + T on a Windows keyboard,
and I'm going to click and drag one of the corners
and you may have to hold the Shift key as you do this
depending on which version of Photoshop you have
to constrain the proportions
as you drag in on that bottom layer.
And then click the check mark to accept that change.
Now to trim away the transparent pixels that are left
I'll go to the Image menu and I'll choose Trim
and then I'll click OK.
I'm going to double-click the Hand Tool,
so the image fits on the screen.
The next thing I want to do is to make a selection
of the blue background, so that we can hide it.
I'll make sure I'm on the Hat layer,
which contains the image with the blue background,
and then I'll go over to the toolbar
and I'm going to get one of the selection tools.
You could try the Magic Wand Tool,
I'm going to go with the Quick Selection Tool.
And then I'm just going to click and drag over the blue area
and that selects it.
I'll go to the Select menu and I'll choose Inverse,
so that now the woman is selected and not the background.
And now I'm going to add a layer mask to the layer
that contains this photo
to hide everything except for what's selected,
except for the woman.
So I'll come down to the bottom of the Layers panel
and I'll click the Create New Layer Mask button.
And there's the result.
If you look at this layer
you can now see that the layer mask is filled with white
in the area that we selected
and with black in the area that was unselected
at the time that we made the layer mask.
So that's all done for us.
All we have to do now is try to refine that mask.
So with the mask thumbnail selected in the Layers panel
I'll go up to the options bar for the Quick Selection Tool
and I'm going to click Select and Mask.
And that opens the Select and Mask workspace
where we can try to refine this mask.
One thing you can do is to come over to the right
and work with the Global Refinements sliders.
So here, for example, I might go right to the Shift Edge
and drag to the left.
And you can see that this is moving the selection in
on the hat and the sweater.
I might also try to Feather it a little
and to Smooth it out.
There's still some blue showing,
so I'm going to go over to the toolbar on the left
and I'm going to select the second tool from the top.
I'll move into the image.
I'm going to make my brush tip a little bit bigger
and then I'm going to click and drag along that edge
and that's refining my mask.
And I'll do that down here as well,
hoping to remove some of the blue fringing
along the edge of the mask.
Now you can spend a lot more time refining this mask.
For now I'm just going to go over to the column on the right
and I'm going to make sure that my Output To setting
is Layer Mask.
And then I'm going to click OK.
Back in Photoshop I can try to refine the mask even further.
Here's a trick that often works.
If you have a layer mask thumbnail selected
in the Layers panel
select the Brush Tool
and then go up to the options bar
and change the Brush Tool to Overlay mode.
You can paint with black or with white paint
and just paint along the edge
and that can help to clean up fringing,
like we have along her hat and her sweater.
Of course, there's a lot more that you could experiment with
to try to make these images
look like they really belong together.
So if you want to take this further
try things like adding a Gradient Map adjustment layer
and converting the whole image to black and white.
Or maybe adding some grain.
Or adding a solid color fill layer set to color mode
to make the colors in the two images more consistent.
There's so much that you can do in Photoshop
to enhance and improve composites.
When you're done go to the File menu
and choose Save.
And that gives us a TIF,
which we're going to close and return to Lightroom Classic.
Now here in Lightroom Classic
we not only have the two components of this composite image,
but we also have the composite image
with the background replaced.
So that's an example of how you might use Photoshop
with Lightroom Classic to replace backgrounds
in your own images.