How to remove white background in Photoshop?

Imagine a fairly common situation for a Photoshop user: you needed to make a simple photomontage. For example, to place a rhino in its natural habitat - in the African savannah. For this purpose, you have all the sources: pictures of the scorched African land and its mighty inhabitant - the rhinoceros. However, there is one small problem. The rhino is depicted on a white background, and you need to get rid of it (background). In this article, we will show you how to remove white background in Photoshop.

For this, the program has many ways, ranging from the simplest one-time operations and ending with multi-pass combinations, which will require almost all the resources of the program. We will focus on the simplest and fastest solutions.

Contents

We turn into a wizard
From simple to complex
For the most impatient

We turn into a magician

Into the first queue we will describe the most common way to remove the white background.

Open Photoshop and load our image into it.
As you can see, we pre-assembled both images on one canvas so that we can start working right away.
Go to the rhinoceros layer (Layer 2) and select the Magic Wand Tool (W). It is necessary to tell a little about the settings of this tool here.
- The Tolerance field defines the gamut range of the instrument. The higher the value you enter in this window, the wider the range of colors to be selected will be.
- Checking the “Smoothing” checkbox will allow you to get a softer outline of the selection.
- If you check the "Adjacent pixels" item, the program will itself determine which pixels, which differ (quite a bit) from the main color, will be included in the selected object. Usually the cut-out silhouette only benefits from this. It becomes more natural.
- "Sample of all layers". The command selects specified pixels on all layers and is rarely used.
Do not touch anything in the instrument settings - we leave everything by default. The default options are sufficient for the vast majority of images with a white background.
Select with the cursor (it will look like a miniature magic wand, provided that you have not changed anything in the program settings) any white area of the rhino layer and left-click on it. We see a pulsating dotted line appear in front of us - in professional jargon, it is called "running ants." It tightly covers the outline of the rhinoceros, thereby cutting it off from the white background.
Press the Delete key and the background disappears.
The last step remains. Press the Ctrl D combination, deselecting, and scale our beast to bring the picture into a natural look.

Of course, there is still a lot of work here, but the problem of background removal has already been solved.

Note. Sometimes the background cannot be selected with a single click. This is the case when there are isolated fragments to be selected. The task is simple. Hold down the Shift key (a plus sign will appear near the cursor) and click on the unselected areas. They will automatically be added to the overall selection.