Evaluation Q4 - Photoshop

Catherine Tansey

This power point shows how to change the background of a photograph using Adobe Photoshop CS4.

This is the software I used to construct my Soap Magazine Front cover and my Billboard.

Firstly, I opened my documents to find the photograph I wanted to edit. I then right-clicked it and went to Open with>Adobe Photoshop CS4

When It had opened Photoshop, the first thing that I wanted to do was delete all background colour. To do this I right clicked the ‘Quick Selection Tool’ icon on the tool bar which gave me a drop down menu. I then selected ‘Magic Wand Tool’. This tool is useful for selecting large amounts of space as it senses which parts of the photo are the same, in this case it sensed the border between Beth and the background by only selecting the background. Once the box had appeared which indicates the selected area, I pressed backspace on my keyboard to delete it leaving me with a white background.

Now that I had deleted the background colour, I needed to make a new layer so that it was unlocked and free to add other layers to it etc. To do this I right-clicked the Layer and selected ‘New layer from background’ and pressed OK.

Although I had deleted the original background from the photograph, I hadn’t erased it so that I could add another background to it. TO do this I right-clicked the ‘Eraser Tool’ icon on the tool bar and selected Background Eraser Tool’.

I then changed the settings to suit my needs by enlarging the brush size, changing the sampling to ‘Once’, changing limits to ‘Discontiguous’ and reducing the tolerance. These are all crucial steps for erasing a background.

Once it was all set up, to delete the background all I needed to do was click and drag the cursor all over the white areas, leaving this checkered background.

Now that the background was completely erased, it was time to add a new colour to it. To do this I selected the ‘New Shape’ icon on the tool bar and selected ‘Square’, I chose a colour clicked and dragged so that the square size cover the photo size. At first the coloured square was on top of the photograph. To change this I simple dragged the ‘Shape 1’ in the Layers section so that it was beneath ‘Layer 0’.

This is the finished product