How to Cut Out Images in Photoshop

Music : [intro music]
Joey Korenman : Hey there, Joey here for School of Motion. And in this lesson with this bird, we're going to take a look at a skill that every MoGraph needs to know how to cut out images in Photoshop. Almost every job you touch will have assets that either come from Photoshop or illustrator, and sometimes you're going to need to go in and get your hands dirty, to get things ready for animation. In this lesson, I'm going to show you some essential techniques for cutting out images and Photoshop. That will save you a ton of time. Don't forget to sign up for a free student account so you can grab the project files from this lesson as well as assets from any other lesson on the site. And now let's jump in
Joey Korenman : The image I found for this tutorial. Uh, it's a royalty free image I've found on flicker and you can see it's, it's this goofy looking Turkey. The reason I picked this image is because it's got a good combination of some easy parts. It let's say we want to cut the Turkey out of the background and put him on a different background. Well, his back is, uh, is going to be pretty easy to cut out. There's a nice hard edge there, but you can see once we get up here, you start to see some trouble areas. Um, there's these little feathers sort of sprinkle around the bird and these things can be really tricky to cut out for a number of reasons. Um, but I can show you some strategies to get a really good result with stuff like this. Um, then you've got these really fine hairs on the back of its neck.
Joey Korenman : Um, and there's really no way you could just manually cut those out with, you know, the lasso tool or the pen tool or something like that. It'd be impossible. And then up here, you have these, I guess these are head feathers. This is kind of the worst case scenario thing, where you've got feathers, which are soft and kind of transparent at their tips. Um, and they're also very dark against a dark background. So there's not really a great way to key those out, um, or, or get that information in a great way. So I'm going to show you how to deal with that. Um, and I'm going to show you how to deal with all these other problem areas and create a good cutout. So to start with, we're going to use the pen tool to get a basic cutout of this Turkey. And throughout this tutorial, I'm going to pause the recording because some of this will be very, very tedious and you really don't need to watch me do every single step of this.
Joey Korenman : I'm going to show you the basics, and then I'm going to count on you to actually go and apply what you've learned and cut out the pieces of this image. And I'll link to this image. So you can go download the same one if you want to. So let's get started. So the first thing I'm going to do is hit P to bring up my pen tool. Now, one thing that I always do, um, when I'm working somewhere new, or if I install the newest version of Photoshop is I change a couple of settings. Now can see the pen tool looks like a pen right now that doesn't make it very easy to place accurate points. So what I like to do is go up to Photoshop preferences, um, cursors, and where you see a painting cursors. I usually change that to normal brush tip.
Joey Korenman : It shows you a preview here. Um, standard means it's going to show you, uh, an icon of a paintbrush, which I don't know why you'd want to see that normal brush tip will actually show you a circle, the size of your brush, and then other cursors for other tools. Um, I set that to precise and this will give you a crosshair for things like the color picker and the pen tool. So if we hit, okay, now the pen tool has this nice cross here. It makes it a lot easier to do fine detailed work. So what we're going to do is pick a starting point here and zoom in. I'm going to start with this beak because it's going to be pretty easy to get that. And it's going to, let me show you something about the pen tool that you may already know, but if you don't, um, I want to demonstrate it really quickly, the pen tool.