Turning a background white in PSE

It's really not hard to get a consistent background color or to fix a wrinkled backdrop in PSE.
I'll show you how in a few easy steps that require either curves or levels and masking.




Open the photo you want to work on in PSE.  I'm using a JPEG, but I open it in ACR so that I can tweak a few things, other than that this is SOOC.  You can see that the background is grey, it's the wall in my living room. It's actually a greyish beige, but I'm going to turn it white.



First I'll show how to do it in curves (which of course is not available in PSE unless you use a plug in or action, I'm using SmartCurve).  Duplicate the background and open curves. Choose the white dropper and select the darkest area of the background.  This will make the whole photo look crummy, and you're background will likely blow out


Or if you'd rather use levels, it's the same steps.  With levels you can just use an adjustment layer, and it will create a new layer and already have a layer mask on it.  If you use this method you can skip the next step.


Now, mask the layer.


At this point I lower the opacity of the layer that changed the background to white so that I can see what I'm doing.  I'm going to paint over my subject so that I can retain the colors on him.  Click on the layer mask while holding alt and shift to turn the area you are masking red.


Alt +shift+click the mask again and raise the opacity back up to see what you've got.

You might want to lower the opacity a bit so that it looks a little more natural.  Then flatten the layers.

Duplicate the layer and set the blend mode to screen to brighten up the whole photo, and lower the opacity a bit.







It's basically the same for a black backdrop, just use the black eyedropper.

Hope that's useful to someone!