Creating surreal images in Photoshop is one of my favorite artist activities. If you’re just learning how to create a surreal photomanipulation, you know that there are always lots of things to cut out from stock images. In this tutorial, I show you an easy but clever way to cut out things in Photoshop. It’s a simple 3-step process that will make your life much easier and effortless! (ᴖᴥᴖ) So, stay tuned for what’s about to come…
Cutting out things from their background is probably one of the most needed techniques when you make photomanipulations in Photoshop.
Especially when you create a surreal photomanipulation, you’re likely to work with A LOT OF stock images where you need to cut out A BUNCH!
And depending on the thing you want to cut out, cutting out stuff can be a tedious, time-consuming activity.
The most common Photoshop tool used to cut out things is probably the Quick Selection Tool. However, this only works fine if there’s enough contrast between the thing you want to cut and its background!
In this Photoshop tutorial, I show you a way how you can still cut out things with the Quick Selection Tool, even if the color combination of foreground and background is everything but ideal.
It’s an Easy 3-Step Process that you can apply to many stock photos!
What you are going to learn in this easy surreal Photoshop tutorial:
- How to cut out things using the Quick Selection Tool.
- A clever hack how to use the Quick Selection Tool on images where it usually wouldn’t work well (… or not at all) because of the color combinations.
These are the 3 steps that'll show you how to create a surreal photomanipulation in terms of cutting out things from the background in Photoshop FAST:
One of the images where I used this technique a lot is my Glasshouse I photo manipulation.
When you hover with the mouse over the image box below, you’ll be able to see the Before & After. And yes, there were obviously a whole bunch of things to cut out!! ´\_(ツ)_/`
- Hover with the mouse over the image to see the Before & After.
I’m going to show you the easy 3-step process to cut out things using the stock image of the hand that you see in my above photomanipulation.
The hand is a free resource provided by MJRanum on DeviantArt. Thanks a lot for the great stock! ♥
(He’s got lots of other awesome stock images over there, so definitely don’t forget to check him out!)
With that said, let’s get started with this surreal manipulation Photoshop tutorial!
Using the Quick Selection Tool
First of all, we’re going to use the Quick Selection Tool the ‘normal’ way.
Go to the toolbar of your Photoshop application and select the Quick Selection Tool. Choose a brush size that is adequate for the area you want to select.
Make sure that the little brush with the + sign in the top bar is checked. This allows you to make a selection using several brush strokes.
If you have the simple brush icon checked (the one in the top bar without any plus or minus sign), you will erase your previous selection each time you make a new brush stroke.
Once you’ve selected the entire hand, you’ll find that tiny areas between the fingers have been selected as well. You could now use the Minus Quick Selection option and try to unselect these little gray areas.
However, for this particular picture it wouldn’t be working too well. It would just mess up your selection.
Of course, you could also add a layer mask and black out the areas that you don’t want to have in the image or erase them with the Eraser Tool.
In fact, it wouldn’t be too time-consuming to do the work for this picture, but if you have different images with more selections that are not neat, it can definitely get tedious!
So, here comes the 3-Step Process that I told you about! It’s a set of simple techniques that will work for a lot of your stock images that you want to cut out.
How To Create A Surreal Photomanipulation – Easy 3-Step Process To Cut Out Things In Photoshop
STEP 1: Adding an adjustment layer
First off, we’re going to add a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer. Go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer and select Hue/Saturation from the drop-down menu.
Alternatively, you can click on the little Adjustment Layer Icon at the bottom of your Layers Panel and select Hue/Saturation.
With the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer selected, go to the Properties window and move the Hue slider up or down. Look for a color combination that increases the difference between foreground and background as much as possible.
When you’ve found one, pull up the Saturation slider to bump up the color difference as much as possible.
I went for a green / purple combination in the example. If you don’t like those colors, you can choose any other awkward color combination. 😉 Blue and yellow would do the job just as fine…
STEP 2: Using the Quick Selection Tool on the layer mask
With the Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer in place, grab again the Quick Selection Tool and Move the selection brush over the hand.
This time, it will easily select the exact outlines of the hand.
If you have a lot of selections to make for your surreal photomanipulations or more complicated things to cut out, this process will really speed up your workflow and make things a lot more smooth and easy for you!
STEP 3: Adding and applying a layer mask
Last step of the process: With the selection loaded, add a layer mask to the stock image where you want to cut something out. Go to Layer > Layer Mask and select Reveal Selection.
Alternatively, you can click on the little ‘Add layer mask’ icon at the bottom of your Layers Panel. It will do the same job 😊
Once you’ve added the layer mask, you’ll see that the background is masked and the thing you selected is perfectly cut out!
Apply the layer mask (Right click on the layer mask and select Apply Layer Mask) and you’re good to go!
When I used the hand for the surreal photomanipulation that I created, I rotated it 90 degrees counter-clockwise and then flipped it horizontally.
To do so, go to Edit > Transform > Rotate 90° CCW. Then go again to Edit > Transform and select Flip Horizontal.
For my Glasshouse I surreal photomanipulation, I wanted the hand to look like its smashing into a glass jar and seizing the doll’s head by the hair.
I’ve created some glass jars with a bunch of layers that you can get here. In the image above, you can see that some glass layers on top of the hand are not yet switched on. There’s only the glass rim behind the hand.
I added a layer mask to the hand and masked the finger tips to make them look like they’re really digging into the hair.
Once I switch on the broken glass layer in front of the hand, my manipulation looks like this:
Eh voilà… This was my tutorial on how to create a surreal photomanipulation for today. I hope the 3-Step Process that I’ve shown you makes your life a lot easier when you need to cut out things from their background next time!
Get the Glass Jars (2x PSD Files)!
Fully Editable PSD Glass Jars consisting of altogether 94 Photoshop Layers
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I hope that this tutorial on how to create a surreal photomanipulation was helpful. If you found any value in it, please feel free to share it with other artists so they can also learn from it!
If you are using anything of what I’ve showed you in this post, don’t forget to tag me on Instagram @ginangiela, or post a link here in the comments. I’d love to see your creations! Make sure to sign up for my email list below so you don’t miss out on new Photoshop tutorials, perks for subscribers and other cool stuff. ♥
