Basic Subject Relocation

Written by Amatocianmonk
2008-05-13

This tutorial is about how to take the subject of one picture and change their location. This is useful for many purposes. For example, do you have an excellent picture of yourself that you want to use on facebook or myspace, but the background is a bathroom stall? Or do you have a picture of some type of product that you want to advertise for, but the product is in front of something ugly? Well, with this tutorial, you can change the background of your subject.

Here is what we want to achieve.

to

Let's get started.
The first thing that we need to do is the hardest. So if you can do this, the rest will be easy for you. We need to in essence, cut out the subject from the picture. The way that we are going to do this is by using the polygonal lasso tool.


The trick to using this tool to cut someone out is to use small lines to cut it out. Do not take your lasso tool and make long cuts, it will make the final product look exactly like it was cut out. No. Instead, you need to slowly work your way around your object. Avoid making them look like a polygon.
The next Step is to remove the background from them. Once you have them encircled by your lasso tool, press [Ctrl + Shift + i] or goto [Select - Inverse]. This will invert your current selectiong so that everything except for your subject is selected. Now simply press [Delete] and remove the background.

And now we need to be able to put things behind our subject. Press [Ctrl + A] or goto [Select - All]. This will select everything in this layer. Press [Ctrl + Shift + J] or goto [Layer - New - Layer via Cut] to put our object into a new layer and leave the now empty background layer behind it.
The next thing that we need to do is to find a background to place behind our subject. I had an old picture of mine on my computer that i used, you can search google or your own archives for your picture.
Simply select your background layer and place in your new image. Then select your subject layer, goto blending options, and add an inner shadow to it. In the properties for the inner shadow, change the blend mode to Normal and change the color to the most predominate color on the border of your subject. In this case, it was black like her sweater.
To some, this may be good enough. But it really does look fake at this point. We need to alter the images to make them fit together better.
Im going to keep this basic for this tutorial, but in later tutorials, i will show more advanced methods to blend two images together in this situation. For this basic tutorial though, i simply modified the contrast and brightness of both of the images. I raised the tree's contrast and brightness by 33 and 3 respectively. I also lowered the subject's brightness by 11 and raised the contrast by 3. I also rotated the subject layer to make it seem more real. This all resulted in this:Much better.
We still are not done, however. To make this specific subject blend with the background, i made a selection with the lasso tool like this, , and i then selected my gradient tool. Double click here to edit your gradient. . Select the second option. The second option uses your foreground color, and blends it into transparent. I changed the foreground color to a light yellow, almost white. Then i made a very subtle gradient on the right side of the layer.Remember to keep the lasso how it was, otherwise, everything on the right will be yellow. We want it to only add the gradient inside our selected area.That is pretty much it. I finished it up by sharpening the background layer [Filter - Sharpen - Sharpen]. Then Merging the layers together and adding some subtle blurs and minor minor adjustments to colors and such. Giving us this nice final product.
It fools most people.
Here are some other examples of pictures where i changed the background:
Original was on a trampoline.

Original was in a grocery store.

Original was in a bathroom.
Original was in a car (notice the seatbelt on the left girl?)
Original was in a gym.

I hope that you enjoyed this tutorial, best of luck to you in your attempts.