These are tips from my recent successful but time consuming efforts to remove/change background colour in hi-resolution pics.
I thought of sharing this on a public post as it may be helpful to some readers. Further, perhaps some readers know easier ways of removing/changing background colour in pics, which they can share as comments on this post.
* The pics I worked on were typically 3000×4496 pixels, 300 DPI and were between 2 to 4 MB in size to start with. The pics were taken by a professional photographer with a Nikon camera who provided me the raw pics.
* Note that I don’t use Photoshop (NOT freeware). Instead for complex photo editing (‘Photoshop’) kind of work, I use GIMP (freeware) on Microsoft Windows. For basic functions I use Microsoft Paint. Many times, for the same pic, I do some editing work with GIMP and some other editing work with Paint. At times I use Microsoft Paint 3D too.
* Magic Select in Microsoft Paint 3D has an ability to select an object with a freeform border with some suggestions provided by the user to the program using Add/Remove similar areas. Here’s a video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po7eJ1KygDo, 3 min. 49 secs. On my desktop PC, Magic Select in Paint 3D did a great job in selecting the foreground object in the pic with a freeform border. But repeated attempts to save the pic after doing Magic Select resulted in system crash! I did not want to invest the time in trouble-shooting the cause for these system crashes when using Magic Select in Paint 3D.
* I explored some online websites for background colour removal/change but all the sites I got on Google search, required payment for hi-res pic download after background colour removal! Here are the websites I tried: https://online.photoscissors.com/, https://burner.bonanza.com/background_burns, https://clippingmagic.com/ . I don’t know whether I just noted this site or tried it: https://www.fotor.com/features/backgrounds.html.
I also downloaded and installed a program doing that but which also needed payment for saving hi-res pic after background colour removal. I think I tried this program: “Photo Background Remover for Windows”, https://photo-background-remover.en.softonic.com/.
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Then I turned to GIMP which has become my trusted program for pic editing that is beyond Microsoft Paint. GIMP’s Fuzzy Select feature did the trick for me. Given below are quick tips about it.
GIMP related tips
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* How To Change Image Background in GIMP, https://www.guidingtech.com/change-image-background-gimp/
* Choose Fuzzy Select -> Click on area with same/similar colour to get auto freeform selection
* Now you can cut the selection to get white background
* Or you can fill the selection/parts of the selection with foreground colour using bucket fill tool
* To set foreground color from a colour on pic, use color picker tool.
* Bucket fill tool can be used to fill rectangles and other shapes too.
* Bucket fill typically does not fill all of freeform selection. So second round work is needed perhaps using Free Select Selection tool.
* Free Select Selection tool is very useful for cutting out freeform shapes. It can be used in two ways: a) With mouse clicked throughout operation from starting point back to starting point. b) With multiple mouse clicks giving line segmented shape going back to starting point.
* Fuzzy select may sometimes leave a border of a contrasting colour from the area just beyond the border. This border may show up at full resolution viewing of the pic. I had to manually remove such a white pixel coloured border after I changed the background from white to blue. That was quite time-consuming. For such manual changing of colour of border, I used the pencil (pixel level), brush, straight line and Polygon tools in Paint with varying sizes (from 1 pixel to higher). Polygon is an interesting tool in Paint as one can draw the base of a triangle (with mouse being dragged) and then click on the third vertex of the desired triangle, to get that triangle outline (filled with white colour if Fill has Solid colour option chosen with Color 2 being white). That triangle can then be filled with foreground colour (Color 1) with bucket-fill tool.
Ravi S. Iyer Misc. Tech. 