Kali's Tips, Tricks & Tutorials

Cutting Out Sims (Photoshop)

This tutorial will show you how to cut Sims out with Photoshop.

First, Open the picture of your sim that you want to cut out. It is recommended to use a photo with a bright, solid-colored background (one that your model is not wearing) because it is a lot easier and less time consuming to cut out. I am using a photo of one of my models, Leila.

Next, you are going to click on the eyedropper tool (circled below) and click on the background to sample the color.

Now, go to the "Select" menu in the top bar and choose "Color Range"

Adjust the settings so that in the preview you see your sim in solid black and the background in solid white. Click "OK".

Now everything in your picture that is the color of your background will be selected. Now you have a couple options on what you could do next.

Option 1: 

 If you do not plan on moving sim to new document right away, double-click your picture in the layers panel and click "OK" to make it a layer by itself (no longer the background layer). Create a new layer and place it underneath your picture. Then, with your picture layer selected, press delete (or backspace).

This is what it should look like.

Option 2: 

If you want to move your sim to a new document at this point, go to the "Select" menu and choose "Inverse". This will select everything that is not the background color (in this case, the sim). You can then drag your sim into the new document.

No matter which way you decide to cut out the sim, there will be green remnants on the edges of her hair (some hair will have more green than others).

To fix this, use the eyedropper tool again but this time sample an area of the hair. I sampled from the area circled in the picture below.

 Now, choose a round brush (soft or hard does not matter in this case). I chose a size 36 soft, round brush.

On a layer above the sim layer, use the brush to color over the green (or whatever color your background is) areas.

Obviously, at this point, it doesn't look very pretty. To make it look better, go to the layer mode drop-down box and choose "Color". This will color the green areas to match the hair color.

So now it looks a little better but the color is bleeding out onto the background.To fix this, hold the control (or command if on Mac) key and click on the layer with the sim. Now with the color layer selected, go to the "Select" layer and choose "Inverse". Hit delete or backspace and it will delete all the color not on the sim.

This what you should get.

Okay, so now the hair is fixed, but there is also green around the edges of the skin (like, in this case, on her shoulders).

There are different ways to get rid of this, but the easiest way, in my opinion, is to get a small, soft eraser (using the eraser tool) and carefully erase around the edges.

Before:

After (this was just a quick example so it is a tad bumpy):

After you erase all the way around, your sim should look like this.

You are now done cutting out and fixing up your sim. You can now add a background or do whatever you please!

Note: my "finished" product for this tutorial is not nearly done in terms of editing. From there I like to smooth the skin, add shading, fix brightness/contrast, etc. This is just an example of what it would look like on a background.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. :)