How to Use Quick Selection to Change The Background of An Image

There are often images that you might want to remove the background from or certain features in the background, or even place certain parts onto a different image.  You can use the Magic Wand tool or the Lasso tool, but they have a hard time with making good selections due to the mix of colours and patterns.  However, there is another selection tool that makes things much easier and that is the Quick Selection tool.  So, in this tutorial, I will be showing how to remove a background from an image and then place the image onto another background.

Step One:

Find an image that you want to remove the background or certain aspects of it and open it in Photoshop and then select the Quick Selection tool (found with the Magic Wand tool).  When you’re using this tool it works like the brush tool as you can change its size by using the [ ] keys to increase and decrease the size which makes it much easier to make selections.  

Step Two:

With the Quick Selection tool selected, drag over the area that you are going to remove.  If it selects parts you want to keep, hold down ALT and drag over the pixels.

Step Three:

With the selection made, we will now refine the edges of the selection by clicking Select and Mask.  Once in Select and Mask, go to Edge Detection in the properties panel, turn on smart radius and adjust the slider slightly.

Step Four:

Scroll down the properties panel and you will see Output.  Click on the drop down, tick the Decontaminate Colours option and then make sure the Output to is, New Layer with Layer Mask and click OK. 

You should be now left with your desired selection!

Step Five:

Now we are going to place our new image onto a different background.  Open the image that you want to use for the background, then select the Move tool and drag it onto your main image.

You can rename the image your dragged over to the background and delete the old background layer.  You will also need to readjust your layers so that the background is behind the girl.

Step Six:

We now going to add some final touches to our image.  First, we shall resize and change the place placement of the girl by using the shortcut CTRL + T for the Free Transform tool. 

Next, add a Photo Filter by going to the bottom left panel and choosing the third option for the adjustment layer option.  Play around with the filters until you find one that you like!

And we're finally done!  I hope you now have more of an understanding of how to use the Quick Selection tool and realise just how powerful it can be!