I am going to start off right now admitting that I do not know where this tutorial is going as yet. That should make an interesting journey, yes?

The first step is going to be cutting out or extracting the foreground. I will also talk a bit about something that I'm NOT going to teach you in this tut, but will teach soon. I'm going to use this base of my cute little friend here to show how to do that.

I made this base just for this tutorial. I put it here as a .jpg in case you want to snag it to follow along, or else you can go make a base of your choice, it's up to you. On this base, Bruce himself looks good, but the background kinda sucks for an icon. Too much light and dark contrast to be able to easily place text. So, we are going to play with the background a bit. The first thing we need to do is separate Bruce from the background.

There are two ways to do this. If I were teaching you how to make graphics for a web page, or how to alter your photography, I would teach you about the extract tool. I still plan to do so in a later tutorial. However, it is not necessary to go to all that trouble for a 100x100 low resolution image. For this, we can do it the easy way.

Double click on the hand tool. This will make your image be as large as it can be in your workspace. For me, the base was blown up over 600%, big enough that I can see individual pixels. This is very handy when you are trying to select the background. Now you need to duplicate the background layer. Click on the layer, and drag it down to the 'new layer' button near the bottom of the palette. It looks like a sheet of paper with the corner turned down. Release your mouse, and you will have a duplicate layer. Turn off the original background layer by clicking on the eye at the left on the layer.

For this image, we need to use the lasso tool to select the background. If the background were all one color, you could use the magic wand, but more times than not the background has multiple colors. We want to click and drag the tool all around Bruce's edges, and then around the edges of the base. Your image should look like this, with the marching ants.

As you can see, there is no need to be exact at this time. Use the lasso tool, then use it again with the shift key pressed to add any place you cut off, or with the alt key pressed to remove anyplace where you went too far away from Bruce's edges. When it is pretty close, press the delete key.

Now the background should be gone, and you should be able to see the photoshop checkerboard in the background, like you can see in the image to the left, and you should have 2 layers at this time.As you can see, the selection is not perfect, we have some extra pixels around the edges making the edges look ragged. We will fix those later as needed for whatever we do to the background.

Now we are ready to play with the background to learn a couple of different tricks about what can be done. Really, the only limit is our imagination.

Page 2 - Motion Blur

Extract the Foreground | Motion Blur | Patterns | Styles and Animation

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