How To Remove a Photo Background With Affinity Photo

Here's how to remove the background from an image using Affinity Photo. You can use this to blur the background or replace it.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to remove the background from a photo using Affinity Photo.
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So say you want to remove the background from a photo and the tool you want to use is Affinity Photo to do this. So there are a few ways to start. One is to try to remove the background using this brush tool right here. Selection Brush. So select that and then make sure you have the mode set to Add and then the width is going to be the size of this little circle here where you're selecting. It's really small now. So if I actually draw with it it's going to be hard to select the whole background. What you want to do is head to something larger and then you can see the circle get larger. Then you can grab larger chunks of it. It's easier if you use the right and left square bracket keys on your keyboard to quickly make the brush larger. Now you want to make sure you have Snap to Edges turned on so that as you get close to the subject it snaps to the edge of the subject. Doesn't have to be perfect. You can see it's taking a lot of the arm right there and that's fine because we'll refine it later. Then you can do the same thing on this side and with Snapping On it quickly snaps and gives you a rough approximation of where the subject is against the background.
Now I'm going to use Command D to deselect and actually do the opposite. It's easy to invert the selection on just about any graphics tool. I think it's easier to cut the background out by selecting the subject first. So I'm just going to just click and drag here to select the subject and you can see it quickly selects the subject. I don't have to mess with the larger area of the background. In a fraction of the time I have the whole subject selected. There's a lot that needs to be adjusted but it's a good start. 
Now the first level of adjustments you can do using the same tool. I'm going to zoom in. You can use Command + or you can use two fingers on the trackpad to zoom in. You can see here where it needs adjustment. So I'm going to shrink the circle here quite a bit and anywhere I click and drag it's going to try to add that, snapping to the edges like before. So I can get a lot better. I can make the circle a lot smaller for grabbing areas like this or along the rim of the glasses like that. If I want to remove an area I hold the Option key down and then click and drag in an area. So I can get a lot more detail there. Then I want to check the entire outline of the subject here to see how well I'm doing. Here's another area that I can bring into the subject. Once this is pretty good I can go to the next stage which is Refine. 
I click Refine here. Then what's going to happen is it's going to change the background to this red color. It's going to tint it red and I can really clearly see what it is I have selected. Let's move this over here and now I can go in and use a variety of tools to refine things even further. So one thing you can do is make the circle fairly large and with the mat selected here if you simply highlight in an area it's going to kind of reassess that area and try to bring more subject in and get rid of more background. So you can kind of brush over this like that and you can see it does a much better job. It's kind of automatic. Now you can also easily add and remove sections. So, for instance, let's say I want to define Background this little area here. What I want to do is draw in it and then let it figure out the area there. So you can do that with other parts as well that you find. You can either draw a background inside of the area. Don't touch the edges. Or foreground you can define the areas to include in the subject that might not otherwise be. So playing around with mat, foreground, background, and clicking and dragging will get you some really good results. Now when you think you've got it just like you want, hit Apply. Now you've got the subject selected. Let's zoom out here. Now if I Delete at this point I'm going to delete the subject. That's not what we want. So I want to Invert the selection. Select, and then you'll find Invert Pixel selection or Shift Command i. Now when I Delete it deletes the background. 
Now let's try another one. I'll use this tool right here and I'll increase the size. I will fill in the whole subject.(Filling in subject.) Now to Refine I'll zoom in and decrease the circle size. Add some more. Remove this area here by holding the Option key and dragging. Now we can click Refine and we can use these tools here to better refine the area particularly here in the hair. So let's make the circle a little bit bigger and you can see if I draw over the hair right here it becomes more transparent. The hair is still there but instead of that bright light shining through it it's more transparent and ready to accept whatever other background we're going to be using. Look up here and see those fingers and see how they are a little red right there. They're somewhat transparent. But they shouldn't be. So let's decrease this quite a bit and I can actually say let's make this part of the foreground here. Then you always have to remember to click Apply. Then we can do Shift Command i to Invert and then Delete to delete it. Command D gets rid of the selection there and we can see now what we've got. 
Here's one last one. Let's do the same thing here. Select the subject. Try to get as much as we can. Zoom in and decrease the circle size. See where we can improve things. Here's a potential little problem. We can make the circle really small here and grab a much as we can and then Option and click in here and drag to cut this out. We'll come back to that. Here's an area that we need to improve. Now let's go and use the Refine tool. We can zoom in here and we can use the mat tool there to better handle areas and go back to some of those areas we knew we were having trouble before. Let's look at this loop here. You can see how this is a little red here meaning it will be a little transparent. Let's say we want this to be foreground so we're going to paint in here and make sure it includes this in foreground. Then we need to hit Apply. 
Now what you may want to do after this is either change the background, somehow, or replace the background. So a big mistake people make is perhaps to use Cut here and Command X to cutout the background and then Command V to Paste it in. You see in Layers here background and foreground in two different layers. That's not the best way to do it. The best way to do it is instead go back to the subject. I'm going to use Command Shift i to select the subject again instead of the background. Copy and Paste. So now what I've got is two copies here. One is just the subject. The other is the subject and the background. Now let's go select the background. We can apply Effect to that like Blur, for instance, to make the background blurrier. Like that. Or apply any effect at all that we want to it. Or we can go and take another image here and put it there and now we Replace the background there. Again select the subject. Move them around and even drag a corner and resize them if we want. Like that. So that's how you cutout the subject or delete the background from an image using Affinity Photo. 
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 2 Responses to “How To Remove a Photo Background With Affinity Photo”

Rich Poley

3 years ago

Great video! I've been using Affinity Photo for years and would never have figured out how to do that. How much time did it take you to learn to do that and what sources did you use to learn to do it?

Gary Rosenzweig

Rich: I just experiment and try things. I haven't spent much time with Affinity Photo, but I've been using graphics apps for 30+ years.

Comments Closed.

How To Remove a Photo Background With Affinity Photo

Comments: 2 Responses to “How To Remove a Photo Background With Affinity Photo”

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