If you have trouble doing a clean looking, precise cut out, this might
be the tutorial for you. Have you seen those pages, where there is part
of a photo there, and its sort of cut out, but it doesnt have a precise
edge, everything just sort of fades away? Well thats what we are going
to do in this tutorial! And then , you can apply the properties you
learn, to leave as little or as much of the background and the subject
as you want! or apply them to mask part of layer effects!
Start by editing your photo, and making it look the way you want. Then
place it on your canvas. With the photo layer selected, you need to use
the lasso tool ( NOT magnetic lasso tool ) and make a general selection
around what you want to LEAVE. this can be real loose. youll clean
things up in a few steps.
once you have your area selected, select the create layer mask tool.
and this is what you will have, a rough edge that looks a mess, but
most of what you wanted gone, gone.
Now, select your paintbrush, select a soft round brush, ( you can play
with the opacity and different brushes for different effects ) and make
sure you have the MASK selected, not the photo on your layer list.
paint with white and black on top of the mask to slowly remove and
restore until it looks how you want. When you paint in black, it will
hide whats underneath it, when you paint in white, it will reveal it.
restore and remove as much as you want. each photo, and what you want
to leave there will be different, so play with it, with brush sizes,
opacitys and styles.
This was my final product ( i duplicated the photo, and played with blending modes to make it blend into the canvas a bit )
good luck!
( the papers and elements shown in this tutorial are from the kit " Simply Grateful" By Designs by Ramona)
