Commercial Photoshop Retouching: In the Studio

Retaining an Existing Shadow in a New Background

Sometimes your client has an image in which he would like to have the object cropped out of the background but retain the shadow. If the object is on a light background, as in Figure 2-35, this is generally a simple matter of dropping out the background.

Figure 2-35. The background here has subtle coloring that the client wants removed

Figure 2-36. Drop out a white background with a curve or selective tool adjustment

Figure 2-37. Copy a four-color image and create a grayscale

I will usually make a selection of the object or the background (whichever is easier) and invert the selection (if necessary so only the background is selected. Then I use a curve adjustment or a selective color adjustment to drop out the background, as shown in Figure 2-36.

Figure 2-38. Using the same selection, copy the image to the four-color image's black channel

Note

If the object to be cropped is on—say, a tartan background, for example—you obviously cannot simply drop out the background. In a case like this, you would probably have to recreate the shadow from scratch. ...