How to Eliminate Unwanted Backgrounds in Digital Pictures

We've all seen pictures that would look much better without their crazy backgrounds. Whether it is merely unwanted clutter, some disturbing object you didn't notice at the time of taking the picture, or mom who happened to get herself in the wrong frame at the wrong time, one thing is for sure: you want the background image gone. Here are the five best tools for eliminating cluttered and unwanted backgrounds in digital photographs.

1. Cropping

Cropping is one of the easiest tools to use, out of all that are known to man, for editing photographs. If your picture can be improved simply by cropping out unwanted background, then cropping should be your first weapon of choice. With amateur photography, it is very common to leave a lot of space around the object or objects being photographed. Consequently, the editing room should be used to evaluate if you really want to maintain all that space in your pictures.

2. Stamp Tool

Sometimes we have photographs that simply have one or two things corrupting our otherwise nice background. Maybe there is a perfectly good white wall, but two things hanging on the wall are distracting from the picture. The stamp tool, found in Adobe Photoshop and its free-counterpart GIMP, is perfect in this situation. The stamp tool is basically an advanced form of the tried-and-true copy-and-paste method. With the stamp tool, you can easily select and copy a portion of the good background and replace it over the areas of the not-so-good background. Choosing to use a feathered brush when applying the stamp tool can produce seamless results.

3. Intelligent Scissors

The Intelligent scissors tool, found in Photoshop and GIMP, is useful when you have an object or collection of objects that can easily be isolated. Say you have a light red box in front of a dark background, and say you want to completely delete the dark background. The intelligent scissors tool can be used to aid this process. You will want to outline your foreground, placing a dot at every turn, and clicking inside your completed selection. You can then easily copy and paste this selection into a new layer with no background. The intelligent scissors tool naturally detects a difference in color when isolating and deleting your area, so the tool works best when there is a large contrast between what you want to save and what you want to delete. If the intelligent scissors tool leaves you with too jagged of edges, try using the next tool.

4. Overlay

Using the normal paint tool in overlay mode is perfect for maintaining smooth edges but still eliminating undesired backgrounds. In GIMP, for example, while looking at the paint brush menu you can select "overlay" instead of the default "normal." If you want to change your light background to white, and the foreground you want to keep is mostly dark around the edges, the overlay tool is perfect. With the color selection set as white, you can swiftly color the background, effectively erasing it without compromising the foreground. The idea behind overlay, with a white color selection, is that the paint brush tool will make light things white, keeping dark things untouched. Therefore, using the overlay mode of the paint brush tool is a much simpler and faster than actually erasing the background.

5. Erase

But when all else fails, the last method of attack against unwanted backgrounds is to simply erase or paint over bad backgrounds. It's tedious and time-consuming, but sometimes it can produce the best results.We've all seen pictures that would look much better without their crazy backgrounds.Here are the five best tools for eliminating cluttered and unwanted backgrounds in digital photos.http://digitalphotomania.blogspot.com/