Clean Up the White Background of Portrait
by Lee on Jun.18, 2015, under Articles, Lightroom, Monday Morning Tips, Photo Editing, Photoshop Elements
When a Re-Shoot Isn’t Feasible…
Which is most of the time, here’s a tip for cleaning up a dark, gray, unappetizing background that’s supposed to be pure white.
The photo on the left is before I cleaned it up. The photo on the right is after I cleaned up the b/g (background) to make it whiter. That was my original plan but, when you’re in a rush, stuff happens.
After I made all the usual corrections such as Crop, White Balance, Levels and Sharpen, I realized the b/g was still a dingy, off-white. For this photo, I wanted Alyssa to “pop” out of that b/g.
I originally did this in Lightroom 6 but thought it might be useful to show how to do it in Photoshop Elements 9. Besides, I haven’t used PSE9 is so long, I wanted to see if I could still get around inside it.
After opening the photo in PSE9, I selected the Dodge Tool (bottom of the Tool Bar assuming that’s where you keep your Tool Bar) and selected a Soft Round Brush. Next, I set Range to Highlights and Exposure to about 10-15%. For this image, I set my brush size to 150 pixels and just started brushing out the gray. As I got closer to Alyssa, especially her very fair skin, I had to be careful not to let the brush go too far into her skin. For more precision, I enlarge the photo to 300x-400x and reduced the size of my brush. This was particularly important for the area between her right arm and dress.
This isn’t something I’d want to do for lots of images and it’s not a fix for images that will be printed to anything over 4×6 but it’s fine for small web images. Of course, the best solution is to get it right in camera.
2 Comments for this entry
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June 19th, 2015 on 11:00 am
Wow, what a difference! Love the one on the right!
June 19th, 2015 on 11:09 am
Hey Juan,
Thanks for reading. If I recall, you take photos of hot rods. This could be done with a car by driving it up on a BFB (big freakin’ backdrop.) Don’t use your wife’s good sheets or you’ll be sleeping in the car!
Lee