Copying animals or people from one photo to another one

Narration transcript

Removing photograph background and copying objects

Open a photo with an interesting object like this tiger here. Close the Layers panel, it won't be needed this time. Switch to the Shape selection tool. Activate the Arbitrary coordinates mode.

Get comfortable with the way zooming and panning works. Zoom by turning the mouse wheel, pan by holding the mouse wheel down and moving the mouse.

Start tracing the outline of the tiger. Press the mouse button and move the mouse to place points around the edges. The selected region is shown normally, while the unselected region is greyed out. You can ignore that for now. Continue placing points around the object's edge. You will get more accurate and faster with experience. Consider watching the tutorial about the Shape tool to learn more about it.

Tracing the whole outline is a repetitive task, so let me speed the video up for a while.

This approach may not give the best results if you are working with objects that are mixed with background, like long hair in a windy weather. In this case, you may need to use a specialized tool. There are several plug-ins originally made for Photoshop, that also work in RealWorld tools and can help you in these more difficult cases.

The selection is complete, but look, there is a region that should not be selected. Right-click and select End sub-path. Then right-click again and select Start new sub-path. Place new points around the hole and it will be subtracted from the selection. When the selection is really complete, copy the selected object to the clipboard. If you only wanted to remove the background, you can now easily do that by clicking on Invert selection and then by pressing the DELETE key.

Let me open a different photo. Remember that the copied tiger is still on the clipboard. Paste it into this image. You can move, scale and rotate it.

Now this elephant is not alone anymore, it has a new friend to play with.

Thanks for watching.

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