Effective background removal from portrait photo

Question

There is a nice tool provided by Adobe for removing bacgrounds for photos, https://express.adobe.com/tools/remove-background. I have tested it with portrait photos meant for documents, and it works very well. Can this process be reproduced with GIMP in a way this is almost exactly as automatic as on the Adobe's webpage?

EDIT

after the "Foregound select" answer. I have tried the Select foreground tool. Still it seems that ccexpress does much better work. First photo shows CCexpress result (automatic) and the second shows gimp results. I have painted on the hair comb that has been included. It seems to me inclusion is too aggressive as large part of the background gets included. Or one has to be more pixel-perfect. If you think better job is possble - please tell.

With blue background both are "not ready" but CCexpress is much closed to the desired end result. In more realistic case: I want to have some light background and I shot the photo with some gray background (like a wall), I would say that CCexpress work is likely passable.

Answer 1

There's no way to fully automate this in GIMP, but there is fairly quick and easy method that is semi-automatic. User input is required though, it's not a one button fix. However, it shouldn't take more than a minute.

Here's a brief rundown on using the Foreground Select tool in GIMP. It seems like a lot of steps, but it's not really hard at all.

1. Select the Foreground Select tool in the toolbox

2. Using the tool, click around the subject to make a very rough polygonal selection around the subject

3. Press Enter

4. Using the same tool, now paint roughly on the foreground, making sure to paint over all the different areas of colour. You can increase or decrease the size of the tool using the [ and ] keys.

5. In the Foreground Select popup, hit the Preview option

6. If it looks good, hit Select in the popup, if any bits are is missing, paint on them.

7. In the Layers panel, hit the Add a Mask button

8. In the Add a Layer Mask dialog choose the option that says Initiate Layer Mask to: "Selection"

An example

Note: Auto or semi-automatic selections typically work best on rather simple/plain bacgkrounds. If there's more detail in the background, it can make it more difficult to get a good mask. You may need to edit the mask manually if doesn't quite work properly.