How To Remove a Photo Background With Pixelmator Pro

The Mac app Pixelmator Pro has a variety of tools for removing the background of a photo. The best method is combining the Select Subject tool and then refining the selection with Quick Selection. You can use this to blur the background or replace it.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to remove the background from a photo using Pixelmator Pro on your Mac. 
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
So a common thing you may want to do with a photo is remove the background from it. Maybe you just want to take the background away completely. Maybe you want to put the subject on a different background or maybe you want to take the background and blur it a little but not blur the subject. So let's start off here with a really simple example. Here we have a perfect situation. It's a very neutral solid color behind a subject. Now Pixelmator has a ton of different tools that will allow you to select either just the background or just the subject. Here you've got the General Selection Tool and this will allow you to select rectangles and circles. Not ideal for this.
Then you've got this tool here which will allow you to do a Free Selection so you can carefully draw the outline between the background and the subject. That takes a long time. Instead you may want to go and use the Magnetic Selection Tool which will try to find the edge and kind of cling to it. It's really neat and it could be used for this. But there are better tools for doing this.
If you go here you'll see Quick Selection. This will allow you to fairly quickly select the subject or the background. Now while this is a great tool for the job it's not the best one. But I'm going to show you how to use it anyway and you'll find out why later. So you could see the yellow area here. It is the Selection. But if I click it and drag it will continue to add to the selection. So I can drag throughout the background. and continue to add parts until I have the entire background. Then I release the trackpad or mouse and you could see it's got my selection here. Now I can refine. The best way to refine is to zoom in, you could use this or on the trackpad you could just use two fingers, and you get a closer look and see how well it did. Now if I wanted to include more things in the background all I need to do is hold the Shift key down and you could see I get that circle and a plus in the middle of it. I can add more to it. So I click here and you could see it adds that section. Now the circle is fairly big so let's decrease the brush size to something much smaller, like 20%. Now I could add more refined little areas there. You could always Undo if you grabbed a little bit too much. So let's look right here. Here's an area that I want to remove from the selection. I'm going to use the Option key and get the minus in there. You could see I could select and drag to select a little bit more of that area. So I can use Shift to add to the selection and Option to remove from the selection if I want. I can continue to refine to get it as close to the edge of the subject as I want. Now I want to go through the entire outline of the subject to see if there are any other places where I can make the selection a bit better. Now with the background selected I can simply use the Delete key to remove it. Now I just have the subject remaining.
Now I mentioned that there is an even better way to do this because Pixelmator Pro has two tools that are basically the opposites of the same thing. You can go to Edit, Remove Background or Shift Delete or Control S for Select Subject. There's also a button here for Remove Background as well. So let's try Shift Delete and you could see it's going to analyze the image and it's going to remove the background. Now while this is the quickest way to do it, no doubt, but it's not the best. Notice, for instance it didn't quite do a great job here at the top. It probably could have taken a little bit more of that off. We can select that separately and then create a more refined result. Or I'm going to Undo here and instead use that Select Subject option. So this is going to do the opposite in two different ways. One, it is going to select the subject not the background. So the opposite selection. The other thing is it's not going to delete anything. It just creates a selection. Now we can actually delete the background if we wanted to by going to Edit and then Invert Selection, Shift Command i, and now we have the background selected. Now I could hit Delete if I wanted to. Or, I could now refine using that same Quick Selection as before. So I could use those same tools. I'm going to add to the selection here and remove from the selection in other places to get more of what I want. So I could better refine it before I do the delete. 
This, I think, is the best way to do it. Use Select Subject and then use Quick Selection to refine things to get it as good as you possibly can. Then I could just press the Delete key and it removes the background. So let's try this with another example here. I'm going to use Control S to select this subject. Then I'm going to select the Quick Selection Tool and I'm going to go in and better refine things. So you can see it really didn't do a very good job on a lot of things. I'm going to Add a lot here to get the subject completely selected. You have to zoom in a great deal here to actually work around the hair. Some bright spots here that didn't quite get selected correctly. Then when I've got everything like I want I can use Shift Command i to invert the selection to select the background instead of the subject. Then I could delete the background. Here's another example. Let's use Control S to select the subject. It does a pretty good job. You can see some of the mistakes that it made here around this strap. Let's zoom into this area. I have the Quick Selection Tool added. So I could easily add these parts to the selection. Get it just right. I can check the rest of everything else. Now if I wanted to I could Delete the background. I'll just do Shift Command i to invert the selection and then Delete or let's Undo all the way back to when I just have the Subject selected. 
Let's say my goal is to blur or change the exposure of just the background and not the foreground. A mistake people make is using Command X to cut and then Command V to paste. Now you have one layer that has just the subject and the other layer that has just the background. You don't really want to do that. What you want to do instead for better results is to Copy and  Paste. So you have one layer here that is just the Subject and the other layer is everything. So now when I select that background layer and I've got both on top I can adjust the background layer. Let's go to Effects here and Add An Effect. Add a Blur and I can make the background blurrier like that. 
Now another thing you may want to do is to put a different background behind the subject. So in this case I want to Copy again and Paste. Then I'm going to drag and drop another image here between these two layers. Command D to deselect but I can click here and move the subject around. Place them somewhere else. Even scale them a bit like that to have them somewhere else. Now notice that there is a little bit of a glow here around the subject. So what helps in these situations if I Undo all the way back here to where I've got the subject selected I can go to any of these selection tools here and I could click Select and Mask. That gives me the ability to refine the selection. So if I Expand the selection you could see I get more selected. I want less selected. I want to go down ever so slightly. Like maybe 2%. Negative 2% to select less of the subject. So now if I click Apply or hit Return, I do Copy and Paste, and now when I Drag and Drop the new background here I get a little bit less of a glow around the edges. So the subject blends in a little bit better with the background. 
That's how you cutout a background or cutout a subject in a photo using Pixelmator Pro. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: One Response to “How To Remove a Photo Background With Pixelmator Pro”

Gary (also)

2 years ago

Thanks for this post Gary - it was a fast way to learn how to do this. I haven't seen an obvious way to change the "threshold" so that background removal is less aggressive though. Perhaps that isn't possible.
Thanks
-Gary

Comments Closed.

How To Remove a Photo Background With Pixelmator Pro

Comments: One Response to “How To Remove a Photo Background With Pixelmator Pro”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information