Clearcutting transparent packet in photograph with objects behind it - Photoshop CC

Question

What would be the best way to clearcut these packets? Is it difficult to remove the background to make it look white and transparent?

Answer 1

Transparent colorless plastic bag against a white background needs some tricks. The bag cannot be anything else but quite thin grey areas and lines plus some glosses. The product in the bag must stay recognizable and attractive, the label must be easily readable and the image must still look plausible. A photographer who has skills and gear up to the task would shoot a photo which is more easily adaptable to your purposes,maybe even without any edits, because you wanted white background. Your hobby grade shot needs much more work, but it's not hopeless.

Here's one version. It doesn't use any advanced functions of recent Photoshop, making the same would be possible as well in freeware (Krita, GIMP, Paint.NET):

The label has been selected, copied to a new top layer and desaturated to colorless. The contrast has been increased, but the max. brightness of the label is still well below the brightness of the background and the brightest glosses. The label cannot have full white. If it had it would look a separate item.

There are numerous manually painted fake glosses in layer Fake Gloss. They are painted with white and distorted with the smudge brush to irregular forms. The layer opacity is reduced so that the glosses are not full white.

In the next image the label and fake glosses are disabled. The compound content (and the label, too, but it doesn't harm) has been selected, pasted to layer Compound and the contrast of the material is increased with curves.

All dirty looking (=greyish because it's darker) compound at the edges has been cleaned by copying over it pure looking stuff with the clone brush. Without the high contrast label and fake glosses the image could still be good enough for something, but cleaning the compound is a must.

There's a manually painted transparent blurry shadow. It's below the compound layer because it must not affect the compound, but it must darken the white background and also bags because the bag must look transparent. The shadow has been placed irrationally, but it's needed to create an illusion of levitation above the white background. The bag is not darkened much when the shadow is placed in this way, but the shadow still does its job.

In the next image the compound and the shadow are disabled:

The bag is selected and paste twice to new layers. The version on the top "Bag Edges" has got filtering Find Edges which adds complex dark pattern. It's made transparent and gray by reducing the opacity to 20%.

Layer Bag just above the white backround is the separated bag. It's brightness is lifted so that the glosses are white and the darkest parts are light grey. The layer is not transparent. That's why the shadow is above it. This is the lightened bag alone:

It does not look good without the edges layer above and the edges layer alone doesn't look good without the grey bag layer.

If the opacity of layer Bag is reduced, the opacity of layer Bag Edges can be increased without making the bag too dark. Here's another mixture:

The bag looks less smoky and the wrinkles are a little more visible. But the enhancement is not substantial. Making the edges more visible turns the image soon to look like it's a drawing or a cartoon effect.

Answer 2

There's no easy or automatic way to do this. It would have been easier to do if the photograph had been taken over a simple plain background. But anyway, here's a rough how to, not a full tutorial:

1. Duplicate the image so you have two layers to work with.

2. With the Pen tool go around the bag, turn it into a selection. Invert the selection and apply it as a layer mask to the bottom layer. Set the layer blending mode to Luminosity. Set the layer opacity something like 50%

3. Ctrl+click the red channel, apply it as a layer mask to the top layer. Edit the layer mask using a brush set to black in Overlay mode. Paint around the outside of the contents

4. Switch to white, and paint where the contents are.

5. Add a new background layer. I've used an image in the example below but you could just fill the layer white if that's what you want.

An example showing the two layer masks. I did this very quickly as an example, but you could spend more time with the masking.