Removing Backgrounds from Photos

I have been an ongoing customer of Photoshop for the life of the product with steady upgrades every year. However, today, I canceled my Photoshop subscription. My main reason is that I just don’t use the program frequently enough. I basically use it to crop images or eliminate the background on photos. It’s not like I am an avid photo manipulator or a creative services production artist.

I Googled Photoshop replacement and found two options that look fine to me. Paint.net and GIMP. I am trying the development version of GIMP right now. It’s taking a long time to boot up for sure. OK I’m in.

I hate it.

Ok to be clear, my use case is simple. I want to take a photo and remove the background. Here is the original:

In Photoshop, this is pretty easy with their selection tool. I tried in GIMP, it took a while to figure out the method. (Yes, I looked in the help system) The magic selection tool has thresholds, but I found it very difficult to find the edges in a way that wouldn’t take me an hour per picture. I gave up after ten minutes.

Next I tried Paint.NET. It’s a much smaller download and a nicer looking interface. It also had a magic selection tool, with tolerances. I followed their instructions but found it extremely hard to manage. You have to drag the tolerance and keep adding to your selection.

Finally, I just googled: Remove background from photo. Do you know what came up?  My old friend Microsoft PowerPoint. It has a tool called Remove Background under format.

First one on the left. Holy Buckets! I had no idea this was there. Again, I feel like Microsoft has this awesome design tool that NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT!

It took about 20 seconds of fiddling and voila.

In fact, I could have reverted to the original image at any time. It works like “crop” – non-destructive on the image. See, I can keep the rock below.

I could have messed around with the bottom a little more to make it smooth, but this was fine. It’s not a perfect feature. It could use a tolerance spectrum to make it less/more sensitive. However, this is WAY more power than people realize is inside PowerPoint.

Good on ya Microsoft!


Comments

2 responses to “Removing Backgrounds from Photos”

  1. I recently needed to do some photo editing while traveling. I have found this app http://adva-soft.com/products/touch-retouch/. I used it on my phone, but I think on a tablet it will be even better.

  2. Elliott Lowe Avatar
    Elliott Lowe

    Nice find – thanks!

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