Editing Photo's

We are making a video to play in the instillation. The video will consist of people's faces flashing and the words that are written on the masks will be played aloud as the flashing images show.

We decided to use a black background. To make the people really stand out, and therefore your focus won't shift from from the person to the background. 

We are blacking out the background using photoshop. 

The method we are using is selecting the person, using smart radius to help define our selection more and then selecting inverse, then using the burn tool on the shadow option and blending out any parts that we missed. After than we flattened the image and exported it as a PNG.

We followed the below tutorial on youtube: