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Tip #20: Darken Photo Background
By: Tedric Garrison (Photoshop 7)Sometimes, things in the background can get a little distracting. One of several
ways of dealing with this would be to just make the background darker. The
trick is to only make the background darker, not the entire image.
First, open the image in question, then go to the toolbar on the left and find the
"Magnetic Lasso Tool" (second tool down on the left side). If by chance yours
is set to just regular "Lasso" mode, right click on that tool and it will show you
the other versions of that tool.
I use the "Magnetic Lasso" because it is much easier to follow around odd shapes
with. The next step is to trace around the subject as closely as possible. One of
the tricky parts about the "Magnet Lasso" is that it has a hard time distinguishing
between similar tones, just go slow. To complete this step you must go full circle,
in other words, your beginning and ending points must meet. Once you do the little
white cut out lines will seem to come alive and dance, this is indicating that this
section is selected.
At this point any changes made will only effect this specific area. But remember,
in this case, the subject is fine, it's the background we want to change. No problem.
Go to the main menu bar (the one that goes across the top), go to the fifth item that
says "Select" and left click once. This opens a drop down menu. Go to the fourth
item down called "Inverse" and left click once. Now you should see some more
dancing lines surrounding the rest of your picture. This indicates that all changes will
effect everything else, except the area you originally selected.
Now with the background selected, you go to the main menu bar and left
click on the third subject called "Image". Within that drop down menu, you
go down to "Adjustments", wait a second and it will open a second drop
down menu. Within that second menu go to the section that says
"Brightness/Contrast" and left click once. This will open it's own tool box
that has two adjustable slider bars, one is for brightness, one is for contrast.
The brightness slider will adjust the overall brightness or darkness of the
selected area. The contrast slider controls the extremes, meaning mostly
highlights and shadows.
The contrast bar can make the shadows darker, but use it very sparingly,
because at the same time you will loose details in the highlights. Once you
get the background the way you want it, be sure to go back up to the menu
bar, go back to the "Select" section, and then click on "Deselect".
In this particular case, I went back and did this same process for the inside
area of the little toy he was holding too. Now you can save your image and
live happily ever after.Photoshop Tip #20: Tedric Garrison tedric@betterphototips.com
