Luminar Neo’s Portrait Background Removal feature makes it easy to remove backgrounds from portraits in one click.

Skylum’s Luminar Neo is packed with AI features for a creative photo editing experience. Now that you can remove a portrait background in one click with the Portrait Background Removal feature, it makes the software even more impressive.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use Luminar Neo’s Portrait Background Removal to remove the background from a portrait, as well as refine your removal.

Before getting started, you can buy Luminar Neo on Skylum's website for $90. They offer a 30-day money-back guarantee and there are often discounts for users who already own other Skylum products.

Luminar Neo’s Portrait Background removal feature is located in the Edit tab under Layer Properties in the Masking tab. From the submenu of options, choose Portrait Background at the bottom.

The only option will be the Remove button.

For a plain background without any complex distractions like the one above, just click the Remove button.

At first glance, it looks like Luminar Neo performed a perfect background removal. But if you zoom in using the mouse wheel or by pressing Ctrl + + to nearly 100 percent, you’ll see part of the background color remains when it shouldn’t be there.

We’ll discuss how to remove this by using one of three of Luminar Neo’s refinement tools.

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If the small details matter for any particular image, then even the most simple of backgrounds should be checked to see if there are any issues. Although small, we should remove the bits of brown background pixels that remain.

To do this, click on the Refinements Brush dropdown menu. Luminar Neo will automatically display three active masks on the image.

The blue mask represents the Background; the checkered white section represents the Transition, and the brown mask represents the Object. All three of these masks correspond to their respective brushes of the same name.

Now, let’s look at all three of these brushes and show you how to completely remove the background from the portrait.

For many portraits with simple backgrounds, the best refinement brush for the job will be the Transition brush. To switch between brushes, simply click on the tabs on the right, in this case, Transition.

Adjust the brush size using the Size slider. You’ll want to make the size just a little larger than the area you’re trying to erase. Then simply paint over the area.

As you can see, the Transition brush easily took care of the remaining background pixels.

To accept the changes, click on the Layer Properties panel. The masks will disappear, leaving us with only the subject and no background. This will reset the menu and move the edit over to the Edits menu.

At this time, there is no undo feature in Luminar Neo. This is why any mistakes made will have to be corrected using one of the three brushes.

We dive into the Undo features in Photoshop for easily dealing with mistakes.

To demonstrate the Object brush, let's say that we want to remove the background from this portrait above, but we want to keep the chair. We’ll perform the initial portrait background removal that we already showed you and see the results.

The portrait background was removed fairly nicely in that the woman's pixels are all there. But a good chunk of the chair is gone and there are some leftover background pixels around her arms. Let’s tell Luminar Neo that the red chair should stay by clicking on Object and painting over the chair.

Now, the entire chair should be masked and will be included in the portrait background removal.

Next, we'll take care of the leftover background pixels. Click on the Background tab and brush over the pixels next to the woman's arm. Remember, adjust the brush size as needed.

We have taken a complicated background and successfully masked it using the Object and Background brushes. Like before, we'll click on the Layer Properties panel to accept the changes.

These results are much better than our initial portrait background removal. But despite using the appropriate brushes for each mask, there are still some unwanted background pixels around the woman's arm and on the left side of the chair.

At this point, we can go back into the masks by accessing the Portrait Background Removal tool once more. We can then fine-tune each mask. But we could also use the regular Brush tool in Luminar Neo to clean up the mask to perfection.

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Once again in Layer Properties, choose Masking and then select Brush at the top of the menu. Then click on Brush and choose Erase.

Now, just brush over the background pixels under the arm and next to the chair.

The Brush tool is extremely powerful in that you can clean up any unwanted background pixels, regardless of what they are. It's the ultimate manual tool.

But what happens if a mistake is made and too many pixels are erased?

This is easily solved by clicking on the Paint tab and the pixels can be brushed back onto the image.

By toggling back and forth between the Erase and Paint brushes, we've successfully removed the entirety of the background.

Don't forget to click on the Layer Properties to accept the changes when you're done. Otherwise, you won't be able to save and export your image.

We show you how to remove distractions with the Brush tool in Photoshop.

Once you have removed the background from your portrait, you'll want to export your file if you don't have a need to continue editing at this point.

Click on the Share tab at the top-right. You'll have three choices: Folder, Mail, and Connect to Device. For the sake of this tutorial, we'll choose Folder to export the file to our computer.

An Export Image dialogue box will open. Here you'll find all the usual export options. If we wanted to save it as a transparent PNG file, we can do that too.

Once all your options are set, click on Export. The location can be modified in the previous menu by choosing Browse.

We also show you how to export JPEGs from Photoshop using Adobe Bridge.

Luminar Neo’s Portrait Background Removal feature makes it easy to remove the background from your portraits. This tutorial also showed you how to further fine-tune all the little kinks and errors that the tool might have missed.

Craig Boehman is a Mumbai-based American photographer. He writes articles about Photoshop and photo editing for MakeUseOf.com.

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