This tutorial will show you how to add a coloured and/or graduated background to your bead photo. You can use Steps 3 and 4 together, or individually depending on the effect you are after. There are many ways of tackling this in Photoshop, but this is my preferred method.

1. Selecting the background
For the purposes of this exercise, I am using the previously cleaned up bead photo from Tutorial 1. A clean and simple background and well defined objects makes this easier to do, but is not essential. In the tools palette select the magic wand and use the following suggested settings.

Then click on the white background with the wand, and your selection will be surrounded by a dashed line. If there are multiple white areas in your background, you can add these to your selection by holding down the shift key, and clicking the wand over them one by one.

To complete your selection of the background (if you have a shadow that is too similar to the colour of the bead for the wand to pick it out), click on the lasso tool in your tools palette and make sure Feather is set to 0. It may help to zoom in closer to your image at this point. (Menu bar>View>Zoom in or zoom out)

Then whilst holding down the shift button, draw around the shadow (accurately along the edge of your bead) and it will be added to your selection. If you need to remove any bits, hold down the Alt key whilst drawing with the lasso. Your background should now be fully selected.

2. Putting the bead
on a separate layer Now we are going to invert the selection, soften the edge so the bead doesn’t look ‘cut out’ and put the bead on a separate layer so we can manipulate the background and leave the bead untouched.
Do the following:
a) Menu bar>Select>Inverse
b) Menu bar>Select>Modify>Contract (2 pixels)*
c) Menu bar>Select>Feather (1 pixel)*
d) Menu bar>Layer>New>Layer via copy

The bead is now on a new layer leaving the background image intact and ready to be altered.
*adjust if necesssary

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