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Masking & Fill Background


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Newcomer needs assistance 

 

After purchasing Affinity Photo my first task aimed at: masking street portraits and/or people from background 

thereafter filling empty background space with one colour: black

 

Despite study of various masking tutorials I have difficulty in: a) separating hair & veil from street background which is of course not uniform like sky, etcc

b) find quick way to fill with black

 

Very thankful for assistance taking into account newcomer to affinity but familiar with Lightroom

 

Thank you of your attention

 

 

post-18501-0-65544700-1442679572_thumb.jpg

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You will have to use a mask and make a black fill layer.

 

Just some hints:

 

For the masking you will most like use the quick selection brush first and then use the refine  option/ matte brush to get some hairs etc.

 

Or you may want to look into using channels for masking as well.

 

The attachment is just a quick and dirty try with the quick selection and the matte brush - 5min

Thank you very much MBd

 

You succeeded in 5 minutes what I failed in 2 days

 

How did you obtain the black fill layer below? RESOLVED, I could do it

 

If I start with quick mask and then Refine, matte brush I always fail the veil

and finally when I select layer mask from the panel at right, I get a mask but it remains the selection active

in other words how I finalise the mask after operations of quick mask and mask refinement?

 

How do you start channel operation?

Thank you again

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black Fill Layer is easy, just go to Layer > new Fill Layer and select black in the color wheel or in the sliders (don´t know what you´ve set them to be).

Then just drag it to the bottom, underneath all other layers...

 

Well I wound´t call this a good result yet...especially the right women is really special with her hair stuff ...

 

You have to put the main part of the brush into the area where the selection is not yet. If you cover to much of the person itself it will cut into the person. 

 

The basic idea behind channel masking is to select a channel where the subject one wants to separate has the most contrast against the background. Then use for example levels adjustment and black and white brushes set to blend mode overlay to get to a (pure) black and white image which can then be applied as a mask. I haven´t succeeded in this at first try with your image but I´m not great in this topic yet anyway....Some do even perform add and subtract operations between the different channels to get a good contrast into the image but that´s to much for me right now and I even think Affinity will improve something regarding this in the future so this might become easier, masks have not all the possibilities as B/W layers yet and for some special operations that would be needed -  I love the idea overall :)

Thank you very much for your devoted assistance regard my problem

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Hi ResKlau,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

Here's some videos that may help you out.

- Making Selections

- Refining Selections

 

For additional tutorials check our Vimeo channel or this page (points to the same videos).

Dear MEB

 

Thank you for your attention

Of course I started even with this two videos before trying the mask on my photo. However, the tutorials work with a rather uniform background which is not my case

 

Would appreciate very much if you have some specific hints for masking the veil (right person in my photo); if so please be specific and explain step be step, e.G. saying try channel masking would not be helpful since I am a beginner

 

Maybe a helpful info for your job: many tutorials are not easy to grasp since the person is using very fast the different operation by mouse without telling where and what the click

look of instance a tutorial of Anthony Morgan for LR where each step is clearly described; I have the impressions the tutorials all suppose that you know Photoshop by heart

 

Thank you for your attention

 

RESKLAU 

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