Someone asked me a Photoshop question the other day, and after some time thinking on it I couldn’t come up with an answer – hoping someone here can shed some light!
Let’s say I’ve got a batch of photos of people all standing in front of the same textured background – for example, headshots against a studio background. If I wanted to remove the background from all these photos, there are a few ways to go about it; the problem is all methods I know are manual, and large batches become pretty tedious.
Now, let’s say the background in each photo was stationary (maybe a few px of wobble), and I had a photo of the complete background without any figure blocking it. Would there be a way to use the complete background as some sort of inverse/subtractive mask, so all you’re left with is the person? At the heart of it, this is about automating the process of removing the same background from every image – so any alternate methods are welcome too. Thanks in advance!
Answers:
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Method 1
What you are looking for is known as a difference mask, difference key, or difference matte. To get clean results, you’ll need a very stationary background.
I’m not the best at creating actions, but here is the sequence I was able to come up with. This assumes you start out with the foreground layer as “Layer 2” and the background layer as “Layer 1”.
Here’s the action in … action:
And here’s a link to download it (test images 1, 2). Anyone more proficient than I with actions can feel free to suggest ways to improve that
Laptop and garden photos courtesy of publicdomainpictures.net
Method 2
Best way to do this is by creating an action.
Do it once in a procedural way (so no pentooling) with selection methods and then play the action for the other images.
Method 3
You can do this very in a easy way using adobe photoshop 2020. Here is a script for this and how to use it video.
https://youtu.be/6ICVsi2pWyk
All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0