Change background to white using Aperture

Photoshop or Elements would be your best bet using the lasso tool.

However, if you're patient (very patient) then you could use the retouch tool to clone a white part of the image to the parts you want to be the background, and perhaps use detect edges around the parts you want to keep (although it will only detect obvious edges). There may be better ways using Aperture, but that's the only way I can think of.

Otherwise if you don't have Photoshop, you could download GIMP and do it that way - doing a quick search on Google will find many tutorials.

ssloshh said:

I am a newbie to Digital photography. How can I change the background of a picture to white? I have a couple of profile pictures taken in the woods and I need to change the background to plain white to make it more professional.

I have iPhoto and Aperture 3.

Click to expand...

As AT06 mentions, it can be done... but you don't want to with Aperture. Aperture is a Digital Asset Management application, that can also do some editing. It gets a bit more technical and complicated, but it does the wrong type of editing for what you want. You need a dedicated editor for popping in a background. Also, if you want a "professional" look, you want someone who knows what they are doing to put in the white background. Or you want to make sure you spend enough hours learning and practicing if you are going to do it yourself. You may want to just pay a photographer to take your photo in front of a white background. You'll be done in 15 or 30 minutes.

There are plugins for Aperture and Lightroom that let you select portions of the image and replace them with parts of other images. Look at Ononesoftware.

I don't know of anything free. Take a look at the web sites for Vertus Fluid Mask and Topaz. There are probably other similar applications.

I completely agree with snberk103 above. You say the intention is to go for a "professional" look - if that's your aim then no amount of editing will ever look as clean as a shot taken against a white background.