In this Photoshop tutorial I am going to show you exactly how to extract an object from an image and add it to another.  There are many reasons why a person would want to do this, one of the reasons could be to create a promotional poster for a band.  In this instance that is exactly what we are going to “pretend” to do.

First of all get an image that has a subject you want to extract from it.  In this instance I will use an image of a girl group I recently photographed called G2L.

1 Select an image, you’re welcome to use my image for this tutorial.

There are various ways to extract an object from an image, however for this tutorial I shall show you how to use the pen tool.

2.  First of all select the pen tool from the tool bar or windows users just press the letter p.  Before you can start using the pen tool however you must use the same settings as me, otherwise the pen tool will create shapes instead of being used as a selection tool.  The correct settings you should use can be seen in the image below.

3. Now you have selected the pen tool and right settings you can begin to draw the outline of the selection to do this click at one point and then click the next point.   If you want to make a curved line first click at one point and then when you click again hold down the mouse button and drag the mouse until you get the curve you want, this can be seen in the image below.

4. Once you have curved your line the next point you will want to click at might be straight, but because you curved the last line you will notice that the line you want to draw is coming out weird and not straight.  To fix this hold down the alt key and click on the last point you drew, this will then reset your selection so the next point will go straight.

5. Once you have completed your selection you should have something that looks like the image below.

6. With the pen tool selected, right click on your selection and select make selection.

7.  Select the polygonal lasso tool (or press the letter “L”) and then go back to the selection, right click and select the feather option.  For this image I selected the option to feather by 3 pixels.

8. We need to copy our selection to do this simply hold in CTRL and C.  Now make a new file CTRL and N and then paste the selected image onto there by using CTRL and V.  You should now have something that looks like the image below.

9. As you can see from the image above the selection isn’t perfect and will need to be worked up on, however for this tutorial I am just showing you the basics of extracting an image from one image and placing it on another.  With a bit of work you could have an image that looks like something below.

If you like our Photoshop tutorials and or our DSLR Tips, then why not subscribe to us, you can do this at the top of the page.   Thanks