Replace Background Guided Edit

- [Instructor] Another new Guided Edit in the Elements Editor 2018 is the Replace Background Guided Edit. This guided edit allows you to remove the background of one image and replace it with a new background from another image. It's a lot of fun and pretty easy to use, too. Let me show you how this works. Now, I'm starting here in the Elements Organizer and I'm just going to do a quick search up here for Captain. And when I hit Return, you should be presented with this image of Captain in the woods.

So, I'm going to go ahead and select that image, go back to Grid View and then, click the Editor button to open this image in the Elements Editor. Now, you want to make sure you're in the Guided Edit category and then, I'm going to go to the Special Edits subcategory. And in the upper left-hand corner, you're going to see the Replace Background option, so I'm going to go ahead and choose that. And the first thing we need to do is create a selection around the subject. And you can see, this image is pretty good but I think another background would just give it more interest and make it more interesting.

So, you can use any one of these tools to create your selection. The reason they give you several options is because not everybody likes the same types of selection and not every subject lends itself to every Selection Tool. For this particular image, I think I'm going to go, once again, to my Quick Selection Tool and this works off of a brush tip shape, so I'm just going to make my brush a little bit bigger down here. And we're just going to start painting over Captain here, and the Quick Selection Tool should basically start to detect the contrast edges.

And if it doesn't quite get perfect, you just push a little bit closer and, as I said before, I mean, the success of any selection is in the selection itself. So, I'm just going to try to create as accurate a selection as possible. Again, using the minus option or holding down the Alt or Option key will allow me to remove from a selection. And this is looking pretty good, but what I may do here to just kind of fine-tune this is down here at the bottom in my Tool options, I'm going to click on Refine Edge.

And then, I'm going to turn on the Smart Radius and I'm just going to increase the Radius a little bit, maybe to about two and a half pixels or so. And then, you could see that this tool here allows me to refine the radius. So, I can actually paint over the edge, if I want, to try to get a little more accurate regarding how that selection edge is created. So, I'm going to go ahead and click OK and now, as I scroll down, the next step is to import another photo or I could use one of the predefined categories.

I can either apply a Preset background, I can do a background of None, in the event that I want to experiment a little bit more in Expert mode or I can apply a color or a gradient to this. I'm going to pull in another photo. So, I'm going to click the Import a photo button and, again, it doesn't present you with the Organizer, unfortunately, so you might have to have an idea of which image you want to use. I'm going to grab this image called IMG_3908 and I'm going to choose Place.

And what it's going to do is its going to put that background on the background of this image. And so now, the next step is you can use the Move Tool to kind of move this around. And you can even transform this if you want to. You can make this bigger or smaller. You could actually come up here, it's hard to see here but you can see the handle for the image and I'm just going to kind of scale him down a little bit. He looks a little giant for this scene here, and I just want to make him a little bit smaller.

And I thought I would kind of position him off to the side here. When I'm happy, I'll just go ahead and click the green check mark. Now, if you notice any imperfections in your image, you could always grab the Refine Edge Brush and you can go in here and you can either add to the selection, we can go ahead and zoom in a little bit and we can use that brush to add or remove. Honestly, this does not look horrible to me but if I wanted to subtract a little bit, I could paint over the edge to kind of trim a little bit.

Like, if I have a little bit of color sticking out, I could go over the edge but this selection actually turned out pretty good, in this example. And then, I'll go ahead and press Command or Ctrl+0 to zoom out and the other option you have at the very bottom here is Auto Match Color Tone. And so, if I click on the button, it's going to kind of evaluate both images and it's going to adjust the foreground element to try to match the background element. So, I can now click the Next button and I can continue in Expert mode if I want to.

And once again, we can see all the details in here, so if I did want to adjust the color of either the subject or the background, I can do that here. What I can also do, I'm noticing now, of course after the fact, that this is a little crooked, so I can grab my Straighten Tool and I think what I'm going to do is use the center of the picture here and just kind of drag right down the middle to try to tell the Elements Editor that that should be straight. And now, when I zoom out that's looking a little bit better.

You can always try that again if you want to, so if you didn't quite get it. It's a little tricky because of the perspective of the trees here, so I want to try to get right in the middle of this and that straightens it out a little bit and looks a lot better. So, the success of this Guided Edit relies, to some degree, on the subject matter of the photo and your ability to create a good selection of that subject. But with the right photo, the Replace Background Guided Edit is an amazing new feature.