I am simply wondering how to make the background of a MOC picture white. I have tried in photoshop but never seem to get it right.

Thanks

Hi, are you refering to pictures of other MOC's with white backgrounds, like in reviews?

Hi.

You want to photograph the moc against a white background, you can use paper or a light box as the background.

In Photoshop you cut out the moc image from the white background. This is then a separate layer. Like a cell in an animation.

You put that over another layer that you fill with white or whatever colour you want. White usually works best.

If you are wondering what tool to select to cut the moc from the background in the first place, use the Magic wand tool. If you right click on the same icon you can select other useful sub tools for marking the areas you want to remove.

Best bet is to search for a video tutorial on the magic wand tool to clarify.

Depending on the photo and your background, it may just be a difficult task that requires work.

You can either use colour, brightness, saturation filters to fade the background to white, or you can do what I do (and is necessary if your photo doesn't have a "green screen" look to it already). I create a new layer, place it under the original and use the paint bucket to make it a solid colour. Then I do 1 or a combination of 2 things: either select chunks of background using the magic wand or by drawing around them, and press delete. This will make that selection transparent, therefore showing up the solid colour on the other layer (which in your case, is a clean white).

If your model has colours that are similar to the background, the magic wand can be problematic. Drawing can be long meticulous work.

Here is a recent one I did, original photo on the left. Obviously I didn't use a solid colour for the background this time.

Anywhere you see the speckly blue I had to zoom in, draw around and delete something. Because the lighting wasn't great, the grey & white parts were too close in colour to the backgound to just use the magic wand or filters, I had to do it manually.

Hope that helps!

I normally use the magic extractor tool on photo shop but it is not good with thin objects as it fades edges too much. An alternative is to paint the background in a contrast color and then remove it, (which gives me overly sharp edges, but is usually good enough for a quick job). The best way for me to get a good look is to create a number of layers, one desaturated and one with high thresholds, combine these to make a layer mask, clean it up, and apply to the original image, merge these layers once you have a good mask, and then put in a background under it. This is what I have been doing this year. It is pretty fiddly but it's the best way I have found to get good edges.