Hello, it's Rob here from Rob coven calm and in this second video where we are enhancing this image of the girl DJ, we have just created a path around the girls chin. So why have we done this? Well, pants are a way of storing a selection, and that's very helpful in certain situations. Here for example, I'm going to get the Layers palette up and create a new transparent layer. I'm going to command Ctrl Click on the path and that turns it into a selection. I'm now going to select the eyedropper tool I and select that black there which is virtually completely black.
And now I'm going to shift delete, which brings up the fill dialog box and I'm going to choose foreground color. Fill foreground color into the selection. And now I'm going to deselect. So let's have a look in here. And as you can see, we've got a perfect edge to the model's face, and we've got rid of that distracting background. So paths are an awesome way to create selections in difficult situations.
It's time consuming, but it's the best option in this particular situation. Okay, I'm going to quickly draw a path around here now, and then I'll get back to you. Hello, well, I've created three more paths here. There's one between the arm and the lead of her headphones. There's another one there and another one to the right. All we need to do is fill them with the foreground layer.
And if I get the Layers palette here up, there's several ways I can do that. I can actually just click on this button. There on To this layer and it, as you can see fills with the foreground layer which is black, or I could again option click on the path and that'll turn it into a selection and then shift option click which will add the other path to the selection. And then again, I can shift delete, which gets the fill dialog box up and we can okay that to fill it with the background color, and now if I deselect, you will see that the girl is fully isolated now, and the background is completely black. You'll also see that it's a rather sharp line, especially around the hair and it doesn't look too good. So So I've got a few options here, I can blur this layer or I can go back to it again and further the selection by either one or two pixels.
I'm going to try and blur the layer and see how that works. So we go Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur, and obviously as you can See the preset radius there is far too much, we want it down there somewhere. And what we can do is click on an edge with this square, and that shows you the magnification of that particular part of the image. And when you click the hand on it goes back to the pre blurred layer so we can turn that radius up a little bit. And I'm going to start again, because I want it more blurred on her hair and less blood on this side. So I need to put those on different layers.
So I'm going to cancel that and I'm going to get the suto actually, to chop this layout right in half. I'll show you what I mean by that. I'm going to click on the SU tool, I'm going to make sure it's got a feather of zero pixels with holding down option. I'm going to Go right down the middle around the image on this side. So I've selected half of this black here. And now I'm going to do command X to get rid of that half and add it to the clipboard.
And now I'm going to go Command Shift V to paste in place. And what that does is it pastes the layer but exactly in the same place as it was copied. Otherwise, if I just do Command V, it pastes it in the middle somewhere. So now I've got the background on two different layers, I can treat them in different ways. So I'm going to get the blur up again, and we want that very much blurred. In fact, as you can see, a radius of nearly 30 pixels, very blurred.
Doesn't matter because it's round the back here and it doesn't notice at all. It looks very good with the back of her head and hair, and now I'm going to select the other layer. And I only want to blur this a little bit. So we go filter, but uh and about three pixels, and that's good enough, that's got rid of the distracting elements on the background there. And also think this wire is looking a bit stupid here. So I'm going to just taper that off, really.
So I'm going to get the gradient tool and make sure it's Foreground to Transparent, and I'm just going to click and drag over that bit there. And that's just created a gradient to just cut that wire off so it disappears into the darkness there. She did here that's gone into a little bit of her hand there. So I'll command Zed that and do it like that. There we go. Great.
So we've done the background. In the next video, we'll be doing something Really exciting smoothing her skin and enhancing the photograph generally. So I'll see you there. My name is Rob from Rob Covent calm, goodbye.