What is the easiest way to take a shot to remove the background?

Question

I've tried Photoshopping a lot of high-res images from Google with a solid white and solid black background but it's just so very difficult to get a sharp crisp real image on a transparent background.

I'm doing a restaurant menu and the sample that I've seen shows crystal clear edges on the food products and they have a transparent background.

I was wondering how this is possible... I assume there is an easier way instead of Photoshop to do this, perhaps when I'm taking the picture from my camera...

What is the best and easiest way to get a transparent background on my dishes for the menu? The sample menu that I have seen you can't even tell it's edited and it has a transparent background... I know there's a professional way to do this. I just can't seem to figure out how...

Answer 1

What you need (if I understood correctly) is just a lot of contrast between background and your subject.
There are a lot of tutorials on the internet about this. I suggest you take a look at the "composing" sections here and there on different websites.

What I can really recommend are 2 options:

• A program that lets you "cut" quite precisely your subjects
• A tutorial on how to "detach" a subject from its background (German language but still understandable)

With the first one, you would basically select the area INSIDE what you need to cut and the area OUTSIDE it. An algorithm then provides you with a normally good result.
With the second one, you work with contrasts in channels in order to obtain a mask that you can apply to the original image. I would strongly suggest this option if you're working with people, because hairs are much easily selected this way.

Answer 2

My thoughts are the easiest way to accomplish this would be a green screen...or a green table cloth.

Place your food on the table cloth, get good and consistent lighting and fire away.

At that point, you could just photoshop and replace the green with transparency.

You might still have some shadows from under the place, but you can darken those. I'd also suggest you follow @BartArondson's suggestion.

Green isn't a required color, but it needs to be something that is unique. So if you use white plates then I'd avoid using a white table cloth.

Answer 3

I've tried Photoshopping a lot of high-res images from Google with a solid white and solid black background but it's just so very difficult to get a sharp crisp real image on a transparent background.

I'm not sure I understand you correctly here, but the reason why these images have solid white or black backgrounds is to make it easy to add them on top of something else.

Blendmode

1. select the layer with the image that you want remove the background from.
2. change the blendmode of that layer to
   • MULTIPLY, if the background is white
   • SCREEN, if the background is black.

more on this here: http://designshack.net/articles/graphics/photoshop-blending-modes-beginners-tips-and-tricks/

Layer Style Blending Options

To make the background transparent, you can do that by modifying the Layer Style.

1. Open the Layer Style of the layer of the image
2. Go to Blending Options
3. pull the "This Layer" highlight handle towards grey in the "Blend if :Grey" box at the bottom

more on this here: http://www.sitepoint.com/easily-remove-white-or-black-backgrounds-with-blending-sliders-in-photoshop/