SOLVED: Background Removal Not Working With Multiple Subjects

Is something not working like it should? Let us know.
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2022-06-09 12:37:07

Version 2.4.3

According the manual:

Remove background from a layer or layer group
Do any of the following:

Click the Remove Background button in the toolbar. If it's not visible by default, you can add it from the Customize Toolbar menu. Choose Window > Customize Toolbar to open it, then drag the Remove Background item to the toolbar.

Tip: In case there are mulltiple subjects in your image, you can use any of the selection tools to mark only the ones you'd like to keep.

When selecting the items to keep and then pressing the Remove Background button I get unexpected results:

Here I am selecting a number of objects:
Image

This is the result:
Image
User avatar

2022-06-09 20:33:32

Hi Lysander! To clarify: Remove Background only uses the selections as a guide for the ML algorithm. However, in cases where Remove Background would normally detect multiple subjects, selections can be used to indicate which subjects should be kept. So you can take away subjects that would be detected by the algorithm, but you can't "mark" a part of your image as a subject if it wouldn't normally be detected as such. Your issue is expected behavior at the moment, but we'll definitely keep this in mind as a pain point for the future.

For now in cases like this, try using the Quick Selection tool instead to select the parts of the layer you'd like to keep, then either Control-click your layer and select Add Mask to hide the unselected parts, or use the Select and Mask tool.
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2022-06-10 07:05:24

Thank you for the explanation.

SUGGESTION: Please update the concept "multiple subjects" in the manual to make clear that "subject" is determined by the algorithm and not the user. The manual should also state "you cannot mark a part of your image as a subject if it would not normally be detected as such. "
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2022-06-10 14:25:15

On it!