Remove, Blur Or Replace the Background Of a Photo With Pixelmator Pro

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to remove, replace, or blur the background of a photo using Pixelmator Pro. 

So a common thing you may need to do with a photo is to do something with the background that is different than what's in the foreground, the subject. For instance you may want to remove the background entirely or replace the background with something else or simply leave the background there but blur it without blurring the subject. You can do all of these things with Pixelmator Pro. 

But very quickly I want to show you how you might be able to do two of those things without even going to Pixelmator Pro in the first place. We're going to start here in the Photos App and I'm going to use this photo as an example. Let's say I want to take me out of the photo. Well a feature of macOS starting in Sonoma is the Copy Subject feature. So you can either use two-fingers on a trackpad, right click on the mouse, or Control Click and if it can find a subject in the photo you can use Copy Subject and select just the subject there. Then you can paste it in something else. 

So, for instance, I can just do a Command V to paste in Pages here and there I am, just me without the background. You can do the same thing in Mail or here I am in Preview and I can do File, New From Clipboard and it is going to create a new document with just what was copied, in other words the subject, and I can now do File, Save and I want to keep it as a PNG with the Alpha channel. That's the transparent layer so that I get this transparency here. I can bring it into another document or use it in some other way later on. 

Now you also may be able to blur the background in Photos if you see Portrait here at the top left. Now Portrait Photo is a photo taken with the iPhone where it knows from the original photo from the camera what is in the foreground and what is in the background. So if you go to Edit you can adjust the depth here and watch how I don't change but the background does and I bring the slider down. So you can see I can blur the background of portrait photos right here in Photos. 

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Now let's look at how you can do this and more in Pixelmator Pro. To edit this photo in Pixelmator Pro all you need to do is go to Image and then Edit With. Then select Pixelmator Pro here. This will launch Pixelmator Pro and open the image. It's actually the image in your Photos Library that you're working with so that any changes you make here will be reflected in your Photos Library in the Photos App. You can always Revert though. So you can make changes and experiment without worrying about that. Note you don't have to start in the Photos Library. You can use File, Open and simply open a new image file and work with the file. 

So in Pixelmator Pro you have a variety of ways to select an area. For instance I can use the Selection Tools here. I can use a Free selection to just basically select any shape I want, like that. There's also the Quick Select where I can basically draw over an area to select it. But the fastest way is to go to Edit and then use Select Subject. It's going to use Machine Learning to try to figure out what the subject is here. Now, sometimes this works better than the built-in macOS Copy Subject. Sometimes not as well. In this case it didn't do as good of a job. It's missing some parts and it has grabbed some parts that it shouldn't. But that's okay because it is just a selection now. I can refine it. So I'm actually going to use Quick Selection here and I can use the Option Key to subtract areas. So I can subtract, like, this area here. I'm going to zoom in using the trackpad, but you can also use this Control up here, and I'm going to get a closer look. If I just hold the Shift Key down I can add to selection. If I use the Option Key I can subtract from it. So I can look around and try to figure out what areas I should add like this area here, and this area here, and then more subtraction like right here and just get it at exactly what I want. 

Now I have the subject selected. But what I want to do is remove the background. That's no problem because I can go to Edit, and then Invert Selection, or Shift Command i. So now everything else is selected except the subject. Now I can just use the Delete Key and it will remove everything else. I can now do Command A and Copy and I've copied just the subject here. I can also, if I want, go to File, and then Export. I want to make sure it is a png so it supports the transparency. Doing it as a jpeg won't and it will just give you solid color background. 

I'm going to Undo and go back to this state where I just have the background selected. Now I can actually apply an effect to the background to blur it. So I can click here for the Effects and I can Add Effect. I'm going to add a blur. There are lots of different types of blur. I'm going to use a Gaussian blur right here and it blurs the background and I can adjust the radius to make it a nice blur like that. 

Now if you goal was instead to actually replace the background here what you're going to want to do is after selecting the subject and then inverting the selection and then using delete to get rid of the background you want to put something else there. Now Pixelmator Pro works with layers just like Photoshop does so the subject here is just on one layer. I can use another file or go to another photo here. For instance I'll take this photo here. Now I want to go to Image and then Edit With and then open it up in Pixelmator Pro. Now I have a second image that I'm working with in a second tab or window. I can go over to this layer here and Control Click, right click, or two-finger click and Copy the layer. Then go back to this first image here and then I'm going to Paste in, and you can see it puts it in front. I'm going to move it down so it is behind and now I can use Command D to deselect so I can see what is going on here. So now I replaced that background. One trick I may want to do is select the layer with the subject, go here to the Style Tools and add a Shadow just to create a little separation there. Now I just Save and I can Close this document. This document I never actually changed to anything. I just used it to Copy out the image so I'm going to just close that and now back here, in Photos, I can see there is the photo I was working with and you can see how it's been swapped out.

If I go to Edit I can swap between the original and the new version, like that. At any time I can Revert to Original. 

There are a lot of other things you can do. For instance, I can edit this and do the same thing. Again selecting the subject but instead of then selecting everything in the background I'm going to do a quick Command C to copy. Then I'm going to do a Command V to paste and it is going to paste another layer here. Now I can operate on either of these two layers. So if I wanted to blur the background I could select this layer here and then go to Effects, Add Effect, Blur, like that and it works the same way. But I could also add different effects to the background. For instance I can add sepia tone here like that to the background or to anyone of these other effects right here. It only will affect the background because I've got this layer that just has the subject on top. I can go here to the Styles and I can adjust things like the exposure of just one layer. So the exposure of just the background. Or I can select just the subject, maybe make just the subject brighter or with more texture or less texture. That kind of thing. You can even go down here and take the saturation out of the background layer, kind of desaturate it and then go to the subject layer here and supersaturate it there to have the subject stand out. So having things on two layers really gives you a ton of options and makes it very easy to experiment.

Then when you're done you can Command S to save and notice back here in Photos you've got now the new photo there in place. If you want to continue to experiment though closing this means you loose all the layers and all of that. The Photos App doesn't save those. One of the things you may think about doing is to go to File, hold the Option Key down and choose Save As. Now you can save a Copy of this and you want to change the format to Pixelmator Pro. Now save that out and now you can close it and you've got this Pixelmator Pro version of it that is outside of photos. But if you go back into it here you can see you've got your layers and you can continue to work with it. Of course this won't automatically go back into the Photos App. You would have to Export it and export it in either jpeg or heic format and then bring that export in as a new photo in the Photos App. So it really depends on how you want to handle it. 

That's how you can remove blur or completely replace the background of a photo in Pixelmator Pro. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.