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App of the week – Photoshop Mix

6th February 2016 By Gidon 5 Comments

Adobe has released a lot of apps for smartphones and tablets recently, and they’re mostly free. Adobe’s intention is you purchase an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, so you can continue your creations in their powerful desktop apps.

But for the average user, there’s a decent amount of power in the free apps themselves, and they are much easier to use. Here I’m taking a look at Photoshop Mix (iOS, Android) and I’m going to try and re-create a birthday card I made for my son in the desktop version of Photoshop.

Firstly I’ll make sure the images I want to use for the composition are in Dropbox, so they can be loaded into Mix:

Load images into composite - from Dropbox in this ase
Load images into composite from Dropbox

In this case I’m cutting out the photo of my son, and placing him with the chimpanzee(!), so the photo of him needs to be loaded second, so it’s on top. (You can drag the layer thumbnails around if you have the order the wrong way around).

Load background image
Load background image

Then select Cut Out which, if you’re familiar with Photoshop, gives you a “lite” version of the quick selection brush combined with refine edge.

Image to be cut out goes on top
Image to be cut out goes on top

Simply drag over what you want to keep – you’ll need to pinch zoom for greater accuracy. If you select too much, toggle the add to subtract, and select what you want to remove. You can undo as needed. You can also change the smart selection brush to a basic selection, if it’s not selecting what you want. Just click on the magic wand to change between the two. You can see I could have benefited from using the basic tool my son’s right shoulder.

A lot of photos will be easier than this one, since there’s not much contrast between the foreground and background.

Zoom in for more accuracy
Zoom in for more accuracy

Your can tap Feather to soften the edge, so that the cut out blends into the background nicely. It’s very fast to get decent results (less than a minute for this one). It’s by no means perfect, but good enough! You can tap on the share button, to either save the image or transfer to Photoshop for further editing:

05 share

Unfortunately, you can’t currently add text, so you’ll need to do that in another program. For those familiar with Photoshop, if you do load the composition into the desktop version, you’ll get a layer mask for the cut out, which you can easily adjust further as needed:

Composition loaded into the desktop version of Photoshop
Composition loaded into the desktop version of Photoshop

For comparison, this is what I did with the full version of Photoshop:

Composite created with Photoshop
Composite created with Photoshop

Give it a try – it’s good fun!

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Filed Under: How-to Guides, Photography, Tips & Tricks

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Gidon’s obsession with technology began at an early age with a BBC B Micro computer. After working for 12 years at British Telecom travelling around the world as a technology researcher he opened a technology retail store in Tavistock in Devon, selling the latest tech and offering IT services to residential and business customers. Read More…

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