How to remove/change background - Affinity Designer

[Sahil Ansari]

In this video, I m going to show you, How to change or remove background from hairy, massive, and complex images in Affinity Designer. In this Affinity tutorial, I have using refine selection with the selection brush tool. I hope It will help you. Thanks for watching it.

 

 

[jmwellborn]

Nice!!

[Chickentikka]

Thanks Sahil, I've been trying to do this, following every different set of instructions I can find, but I keep getting stuck.  Yours is the clearest, but it is still not working for me. After I have refined the selection and clicked apply, nothing happens...the wiggly selection lines remain and when I try to move the background away the whole image comes with it, leaving the outline of the selection area behind.  What am I doing wrong?  

[jer]

On 12/11/2020 at 12:01 PM, Chickentikka said:

Thanks Sahil, I've been trying to do this, following every different set of instructions I can find, but I keep getting stuck.  Yours is the clearest, but it is still not working for me. After I have refined the selection and clicked apply, nothing happens...the wiggly selection lines remain and when I try to move the background away the whole image comes with it, leaving the outline of the selection area behind.  What am I doing wrong?  

@Chickentikka Perhaps a little late but if you're still tuned in, here are a couple of points you can check:

2:21 notice in Refine the author has changed the Output field to New Layer with Mask before Apply is clicked. While it is just one way to do it, the remaining steps of his video work with that method.

2:25 notice the selection produced is not clean and has smudges around the edges that were not masked. This is common with Refine and the author's new bkgd to be added is busy enough that the flawed selection will not matter. Your particular subject image and bkgd image might require you to use additional techniques to further clean up the selection.

2:36 notice in the layers panel that the author has unclicked the visibility of the original layer (that contains the nested Levels layer) and only the New Layer with Mask layer (named Pixel) is visible at the top of the layer stack. The California layer is being File > Placed there on top of the stack but then needs to be dragged down to the bottom of the layer stack. The visibility of the original layer is still off.

Observation: The author used Affinity Designer for this effect but primarily worked in the Pixel persona. If you have Affinity Photo, you could have easily started there and accomplished the same outcome, but with the advantage of more pixel-related tools at your disposal if you really wanted to clean up the selection. That's a big Affinity advantage, personas and the ability to switch between the programs. Anyway, check the 3 time positions noted above to see if a misstep there is causing your problem.

 

[risingkirin]

This is great! Thank you Sahil.