Photoshop a person into a picture

How do you Photoshop a person into a picture? Photoshopping someone into a photo requires a few different techniques to be able to get a professional and seamless result. But with this Photoshop Recipe, you can use it on any photo and get professional results each time.

• Cut out the person
• Layer them onto the photo you want to merge them with
• Adjust the scale and position of your person
• With a Curves adjustment layer, match the tone of the darkest areas
• Match the brightest highlights with a curves adjustment layer
• With a Color and Saturation adjustment layer, match the saturation
• With Curves, match the Red, Blue, and Green channels
• Make person layer a Smart Object and add a noise filter and match the grain in the image
• Paint a mask on the person to overlap parts of the foreground
• Add textures
• Add light blooms

Photomontages are a commonplace part of being a designer. Whether it’s quickly pulling together a social post asset or creating a product mockup for an Investor Deck. You will no doubt need this skill at some point in your career. Being able to create these montages in a non-destructive way is vital. It allows you to make tweaks and changes based on feedback from your clients without having to re-do any of the work.

In this tutorial, I will show you the professional way to achieve a Photo Montage in a consistent and easy-to-follow way.

Get the images

If you want to use the same images as me then you will need this photo from Pexels, by Artem Beliakin, for the background. I have removed the person from it – if you need help doing that then follow this tutorial

For the person, I have used this photo from Pexels, by Murat Esibatir.

Cut out the person

So the first step is fairly obvious. You will need to cut out a person from a photo or a stock image. This is the person that you will want to layer into another photo. You will match the colors, saturation, light of the new background image with this person. But for now, let’s get this person cut out. Open your image with the person into Photoshop. Duplicate the layer in the Layers Panel by using CTRL-J. We will make our edits to this layer and keep the original hidden in case we need it later for anything.

Select the layer, rename it, Person, by double-clicking on the layer’s title in the Layer Panel.

Now go to the Tool Bar on the left-hand side. Select the Magic Wand tool. Now we aren’t actually going to use this tool. But because we have selected it, another option is given to us. We can now see a button on the top menu of Photoshop that says, Select Subject. Click that button and it should give you a good selection of your person. Now if you have a fair amount of hair on your person, then you can click Select and Mask, which brings up a new panel.

At the top of this panel, you will see Refine Hair. You can click that to get a better selection of the hair. Be careful, sometimes this actually causes more problems than it solves. But it’s worth trying. Now exit out of that panel.

On the top menu in Photoshop, go, Select > Modify > Contract and set the value to 1. This will bring your selection in by one pixel. This is really useful as it will help clean up your edges. Otherwise, you might find that you get small amounts of your background which will make your photo montage look unprofessional.

In that same menu go Select > Modify > Feather and set the value to 0.5 this will give a slight blur to your edge, just enough to allow your person to blend into the new background image. You can try other values, but I find that if you overdo it with this feather it can look really obvious that this has been Photoshopped. And we want to avoid that!

Now click the mask icon at the bottom of the Layers Panel. This will give you a clean cut out of the person. But the best thing with using a mask is that you can paint in it to reveal or hide elements. This is a non-destructive way of cutting someone out. An example of destructive editing would be to just copy and paste your selection, creating a new layer with your person on it.

Layer your person into a background image

Open up the new background photo that you want to add your person layer into. Make sure that the resolution of this background photo is similar to that of your person. You want to avoid having one of your images being significantly lower resolution as it will look unnatural.

Go to your Person PSD, right-click the layer and click Duplicate Layer. From the drop-down box, select the background photo you just opened and click OK. Go back to your Background Photo PSD and you will see your person layered in. It looks bad though doesn’t it! So let’s set about fixing some things.

Scale and Position

The first thing I want you to look at is the scale of your person in comparison to their new environment. Do they seem to tall or too short? Use CTRL-T to transform your person so that they fit within the environment better. If you find that when scaling your subject it is not locking the ratio, then hold down Shift while using CTRL-T transform. This will keep your person scaled in the correct proportions.

Paint a mask for your subject

If we look critically at our person in the environment, perhaps the next thing that stands out to you is that they are walking on top of the flowers and grass. We need to fix that so that they seamlessly appear behind the foreground plants. We will do this in a non-destructive way by painting a mask. Now we could paint a mask on the person, but that would mean if we moved the person to a new area, the mask would move as well, causing us to have a pretty strange-looking foreground.

To overcome this, we will paint our mask on a Group Layer. Create a new Group in the Layers Panel and call it Person Group, and drag the person into it. Then with the group selected, hit the mask icon at the bottom of the Layers Panel. Select your person layer, and make the Opacity 50%, then select the Person Group. Click into the mask of the Person Group and with a soft black brush, start to paint the feet away, then look at the flowers behind her legs, paint a few of these so that they appear over her legs. We want it so that we have a few flowers and grass stems in front of her legs.

Color Correction

Before we move into color correcting this image, let’s talk about how we look at the image to find out what we need to do to it. Scan your eyes across the image and notice what pops out to you, for me the lady appears to have more red in the black areas of her pants, than the background’s darkest areas which is far more green – this is something we will need to adjust. A tip from the art world of painting is to squint with your eyes at a piece of art, this helps you see the contrast between areas, when I do this the lady feels too contrasted, too dark compared to the field of flowers. If you look at the brightness of the light on top of the flowers, it looks warm and highlighted. We will need to achieve similar in her skin.

Edit the darkest and lightest values of the image

Take a look at the blacks of her pants and then look at her environment. We need to match her to her new environment and the first step is to match the blacks.

In the Layers Panel, at the bottom, click the Create new Adjustment Layer icon. It looks like a circle, half white, half black. From the list select Exposure. In the Layers Panel, double click the new exposure layers icon to open the Properties window. Set the Exposure to 1.11. This will brighten up the person, then at the bottom of this Properties panel there is an icon of a square with a down arrow, click that. This little icon is really useful as it locks this adjustment to only the person. We don’t want to brighten up the environment at all, we want to match the person to it. So by doing this we only affect the person – we will do the same for all of our color correction.

Curves Adjustment Layer for Red, Green and Blue

The Exposure adjustment layer has helped to brighten up the person but we still need to edit the image so that the Reds, Greens and Blues within the person layer match the background. We will use a Curves Adjustment layer to do this. Click the Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers Panel and select Curves from the list. Double click it’s icon on its layer to open up the Properties box.

RGB: Add two points to the RGB curve, the same as you see in the image. I almost always use curves in this way, by adding two points, one near the bottom and one near the top means that you can create S curves which can be really handy when adjusting colors.

Tweak the top point on your RGB curve so it’s slightly higher.

RED Channel: add the two points as you see in the image, note the position of the bottom point in comparison to the square grid you see

GREEN Channel: Add your two points the bottom point is ever slightly raised up from the middle. These small adjustments might seem insignificant but it all adds up to create a blended image.

BLUE Channel: Add your two points, the top point is slightly lowered.

Take a look at the image comparison above. Notice how the left-hand side has more red in the blacks vs the right-hand side now has more green. There’s less red in her face and it’s generally becoming closer to the background in it’s color range.

Adjust the shadows

Now I want to adjust the shadows on the inside of her jacket and around her neckline. I want to create a more muted to look with a more green shadow.

Make a new Exposure Adjustment Layer. Click it’s mask and press CTRL-I to invert it so that it is now black. With a soft brush paint with the color white in the mask. We want to paint the inside of her jacket – I am concentrating on her left hand-side.  Check the image for a look at the shape I am painting.

Double click the icon for your new Exposure Adjustment Layer and put these settings in: Exposure: -1.39, Offset +0.0107

Create a new Brightness/Contrast Adjustment Layer, double click its icon in the Layers Panel to access it’s properties, and set the attributes to: Brightness -14, Contrast -2 Now holding ALT drag the mask from your Exposure Adjustment Layer onto this Brightness and Contrast layer.

Curves Adjustment

Make a Curves Adjustment Layer, hold down ALT and drag the mask from the previous layer on to it. We are concentrating our attention on the inner shadows and we want to make them a little less red and move them towards the green. These adjustments are small but will give a big difference. Copy the Curve settings below in the image .

Make sure the Adjustment layer is locked with a Adjustment Clip to the person only so that in the Layers Panel you see a little down arrow next to you adjustment layer. All of your adjustment layers should have this. Otherwise it will affect the background also – which you do not want!

Reduce the saturation with curves

One last curves adjustment to finish the color correction of the person. Now I am looking at the person as a whole, and it feels a little saturated, perhaps has too much depth to it. By this I mean that the blacks are too dark and the lights are too light. We want to try and flatten that out a little. So that she is flatter in her color like the background is.

Using only the RGB part of the Curves Adjustment Layer – and don’t add a mask to this layer, but do make sure it is Clipped (with the little down arrow). Move the curve point in the bottom left upwards, and move the curve point in the top right downwards a little. This reduces the depth of the blacks and mutes the whites a little. It’s all very subtle but it helps to flatten out the image of the person.

Adding a subtle Glow

This is a fun technique that you can use in many different ways. Press CTRL SHIFT ALT and E at the same time. This flattens your image and puts it at the top of your layer stack. But it also keeps your layers unchanged. Right click this new layer and set it to Smart Object. This is so that we can add filters to it but still control them later on.

Go Filter > Gaussian Blur – set to 8

Go Filter > Noise – set to 4

Set the Blend Mode to Screen. We will use two adjustment layers to reduce it’s brightness.

Create a new Levels Adjustment Layer and set the middle value to 0.7 and click the Adjustment Layer Clip icon.

Create a new Curves Adjustment Layer and change its curve to match the one in the below image.

Here’s the final image. We’ve had to adjust the shadows so that they had less red in them and leaned them towards green, muted the blacks and whites so that the image became flatter. Added curves adjustments so that we had a more refined control over Red, Green, and Blue. And then added an overall glow which has helped to bring it all together. When working on your next photomontage the values you input will be different, but the process for looking at your images and deciding on what needs to happen to them will be the same.

Now you know this technique I have the perfect next tutorial for you that you can put into your design portfolio. Take a look at our Book Cover design tutorial.