Learn how to Cut Out An Object Without Having Background.



Ever wondered how do you cut out an object from an image, but yet don’t show the ‘canvas’ or white square background? This is probably one of the most asked questions regarding Photoshop, and a very good one too. It’s because of this ability that makes Photoshop so powerful in image editing. Even for myself, I had also wondered how do you get rid of the background of objects, especially for T-shirt printing, since you don’t really want the background to be printed too!

Preparation:

The first step is to get your photograph ready in Photoshop. You can drag it into Photoshop or just go to File > Open > your photo.

This tutorial was done on Adobe Photoshop CS5. Other versions may vary slightly.

Step 1:

Okay so depending on the picture you have, and the object you want to outline, the difficulty varies. Let’s take a look at my example, today I’ll be outlining and extracting out the family of four. First things first, make sure your layer is Rasterized. It simply means in raster form (dots or pixels), not vector. To check, just right-click on your photo’s layer. If the Rasterize Layer is greyed out means you’re good. If not, select Rasterize Layer!



Step 2:

Now we have to outline out the object, in this case, the four people. If you haven’t read the Outlining Object guide, please do so and then come back here. I’ll be using, as always, the Polygonal Lasso Tool. Remember to zoom in and out to make your outlining life much easier and accurate! It took me about a good 5 minutes to outline this, and after outlining you should get a nice dotted outline like this.