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Lesson Info

How to Make Selections in Photoshop Based on the Focus Area

in this video, I'm going to show you how to click two buttons, select and focus area. It's great for selections because it's blurry background sharp object. It does a pretty amazing job just grabbing it. There's a little bit of work to do and I'll show you how to do that in this video. I'll also show you how to take that same selection kind of something in focus and turn it into an adjustment layer. You can see the hydrant there just kind of instead of masking it, we're using it for adjustment layers will also show you some harder things where it's in focus and out of focus but the hands not. But I'll show you still how to get a good selection. I'll show you when it goes absolutely horribly wrong and you end up with stuff like this and how to get around it. And then the end will do a little project where we cut this out and we stick it onto this background semi believably look at that. The shadows and all. So you and me, my friend are going to continue on the selection path and learn h...

ow to use focus area together. Let's jump in. All right to get started. Let's open up the files we're going to use it's an 02 selections still and go to focus area 1 to 6. Open up the mall. Alright, so we're gonna start with six. I want you to be prepared for amazing nous the reason this works is because there is a really shallow depth of field backgrounds, blurry but the subject in this case of flour is in focus so it works perfect and what we'll do is we'll work our way through. I've got some ones that are really easy through the ones that are quite hard. Now. Also note That this technique is just the starting like remember subject was great but then we went to the selected masks to fix it up. It's the same for this technique. It does a lot of the heavy lifting 80% there and then we use selected master tidy it up so kick back, relax and be amazed. Cool. Huh? Now you can see the edges are a bit off, we can fix it up with select and mask, you can jump straight straight to that from here which is cool um you might have to adjust the focal range. Okay so lower um is a bit more exactly looking for sharper parts of the image and if you raise it higher it's a bit more forgiving and goes, what do you mean this, this and this, this one's pretty easy because it's very clear backgrounds, very blurry foreground is very sharp in comparison things you will have to do is you can see here it doesn't really know what to do with this thing in the middle. So you've got these two options you can add to the selection or remove. Okay so basically think of this as the quick selection tool, we looked at it earlier over here. Okay so the same technique, you don't have to like paint it all the way and just kind of click a little bit and it goes off and tries to race around and find what you mean. That's pretty much all for this particular one. Let's click select and mask. So now we're back into that window that we've used quite a few times. Okay, it's over here, remember our global changes, we can use our refined brush or whatever you want to use now in this case, radius around the edges. It's doing a pretty nice job. I'm doing mine against what is it? Is against white. Check it against black on black, sorry on black, it looks nice on white, looks good, awesome. And what am I gonna do with it when it's finished? I'm going to output to a selection now I'm going to output to a layer mask and then click Ok cool. Huh? Let's look at some harder ones. Let's jump to focus area too. Now you don't always want to make a complete mask like we did in this one here, sometimes we just want to grab an area to play around with things like the levels or change the colors. So let's do the same technique but let's look at using an adjustment layer instead it's the same technique, select focus area, kick back, relax. You can do the adjustments here. It's pretty good, I'm going to add that bit and use minus two minus and the think of it remember like the quick selection tool, there's a little bit down here to add a couple of its down here. If you find it hard to like check what's what's missing, what's not play around with these different ones on black. Okay, overlay. Just try these different ones so you can see clearly what's maybe missing and say white or black and white is pretty good here. So I'm gonna add that. I'm going to add that and we've got a good start. You can play around with soften edge and it does but it's just kind of like, like just a one tick where you can go into select a mask and because we are super advanced awesome people, we get to use all of these features to make it quite sweet. Okay, so which one am I going to use on? Black looks pretty clear. Okay. And radius. Yeah, it's working nice. Maybe just smooth it out a little bit. You don't see me using feather or contrast much. It's just preference. Have a play around with them. It does, I'm going a bit high but it kind of feathers the edge that might be exactly what you need. There's no right or wrong really in here. The cool thing about it. Is there only about what six or seven options to play around with the experiment on your own when it's finished instead of going to a layer mask. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to say stay as a selection because it's okay now it's just a lovely selection now if I go to my adjustments panel and say do levels or curves. If I do levels, you can see it turns my selection into a mask on my adjustment layer which is levels, hasn't touched the background. Now with the levels here I can go through and just kind of kind of balance it out a bit. I want to be really subtle in these tutorials but it's hard when you're being subtle because you can't see what I'm doing on the video often so you can see what I've done there. I've just darkened it up a little bit. I just wanted to show you an extra way of using focus area. Okay, grab the stuff that's really close and really work on it. Maybe the same thing with vibrance instead of levels or But both. Now let's look at some problematic of uses and how to get around them. I find this is the most valuable stuff because not always you're going to get a perfect kind of flower on its own. So focus area three. So this image has probably the biggest problem is that it is it's got a really high isso or grain. Okay, that is kind of in the image so it's kind of all over it. So it does find it hard to like break away from like water sharp and what is blurry because of that grain. So I'll show you a couple of ways of getting around it. Let's go to select, let's go to focus area If you can hear 90s dance music in the background. The construction workers that have left from yesterday have now been replaced with shop fitters Who love the 90s dance anthems, which is cool, not so good for you and me recording, so enjoy the backing music you probably can't hear. It's probably just me and so you can see here under against white or on white, it's just kind of grabbed. This is the only thing I could really find that's really sharp. You might find with our really grainy image that this image noise level kind of up and down will help drag it up, drag it down, see if that fixes it for you. I'm yet to find it useful for me too much, but I should show you because I haven't used it enough to say it's like good or really bad given adjustments. An easy slider. So what we're going to have to do is, there's, there's just a big chunk of hand missing and the options up here on black, um black and white, so it's not very handy to know what else I need to select. The only one that really works is overlay. Okay, overlay allows us to see a kind of a ghost of the background, there's no kind of capacity slider, like we have in selected mask, so just pick overlay and then let's grab the plus and I'm just gonna kind of click along and let Photoshop do its magic. Oh, Photoshop, you're so good at that, I just do little bits. A mic freaks out my computer a little bit, but also squeezing the quick selection tool, I find doing smaller little chunks is easier but here's a little harder minus. Hold down the option key on a Mac instead of coming up here to minus or OK on a pc to change it to minus. Alright, we're not gonna spend too much longer in here, but there's two ways of kind of working through it, you can play around with the noise level but also just add and subtract to the mask and it's easiest done when you're an overlay. So I'm going to go to select the mask, I always go through select the mask to tidy it up, you might go, no, I'm just going to go straight to being a layer mask, awesome job done and you're happy enough with it. And then later on you might come back and click on the mask and then go to select the mask to get back to where I kind of go directly and I'm gonna smooth the edges. Maybe smart overlay and in this case I'm probably gonna need to use not this first one, not this one here, I'm probably gonna have to use just a plain old brush tool because this but here the computer is not going to be able to work out the difference between the background, Let's go back to marching. And actually because we're in here we can lower the opacity of that black on black, just to make it easier to see what's in the background here. And because we've got this brush tool here, I make it bigger, hardness is I like it between 85 and 95 and hold down the option key and just kind of paint it out. Maybe it needs to be, the fuzziness needs to be a little bit lower, or hardness needs to be lower. Okay, just to give it that kind of blur with the background. Yeah, there's probably this one down here actually, I'm okay with that, it's pretty amazing that there's a hole in the middle. If you are getting through this course, you're like I can't remember how do you do the red thing again? If you're on a MAC, hold down the control and option key, just hold them down and then click and hold your mouse, drag left and right up and down, gives you size and hardness. If you're a pc it's a bit weirder. Maybe not weird. Is whole control key down on your keyboard and then with your right mouse key, like the other one that you don't use very much the right click, click and hold that down and go left and right up and down. Alright, so I'm in here, I'm going to go and this one here instead of just using the paintbrush, I'm going to use the quick selection tool because instead of trying to paint it out because it is very clearly different from the rest of it. Just kind of click once in there. Nice. Let's click OK. And a pretty sweet mask. Let's get into focus area four where it really doesn't work. Okay? So we're going to select, we're going to go to focus area. We kind of see that it is but it's got that grain problem again where huge amount of green in here but it's making it the background and foreground quite consistent and it just doesn't work and I'll show you a way around it kind of lets go to focus area. Kick back, relax. And you kinda just gotta here it's okay and you just won't fix it in here. You just need to because this is a person or a human. It works better with select subject. It's like subject kick back, relax. Come on. It's like subject. You see their magic. So I'd start with this and add my layer mask and with the selected go to select the mask and tidy things up. But we did that in an earlier tutorial. I guess I wanted to show you just sometimes focus area doesn't work and you might have to look at different ways of doing it. We've looked at a few selections already channel masks and subject. The last one we're going to do is we're going to cut this out and stick it like a proper project rather than just looking at it, you know? And here is a mask, we're going to combine stuff and just look at a few, try together some stuff we've already learned and turn into a little projects so that in the next video I'll set a project of your own to do this with me and then in the next video you can do it by yourself. So I want to cut that out there so to do that same thing um it looks like it's clearly going to be good for the technique we're using, which is the select focus area. Now I'm going to switch it to on white on white is probably a good or I'm black on white is probably going to, it's a little bit clearer now, I'm gonna have to minus some parts out, brush hardness. Going to get it down a little bit. It doesn't really matter that much when using the quick selection tool. Okay, I've got the basics in there and that's pretty cool. Right focus area you rule, let's go and fix it up a little bit. Let's go to stick the mask alright, it's pretty good comparing it against white. I'm going to turn up the capacity now to 100 white versus black. I feel like white is probably a better example of how good the selection especially on this side. First up I probably let's just see how we go with a little bit of radius and a little bit smoothing. I'm pretty okay with this really fixed up these edges here. Remember I'm going to zoom in, hold Peaky down on your keyboard, that's the original. Actually don't hold it down, just tap it on off. On off. Pretty amazing. Huh? The other thing I want to do is those are actually part of the original, right? If I turn this down there actually just part of the original image but I don't want them. So I'm gonna go to the these are the tools, they're not going to work right? The refine edge tool because it's such a solid thing, it's just not going to do what I needed to do. So I'm going to undo a couple of times, just a plain old paintbrush, I'm going to prick our size and hardness, something about their hardness, trying to match the hardness of the edge here of what's already there in focus. If you're if you're sick of that shortcut with the red thing, you can just do size and hardness up here right, okay, but I am now going to hold down my whole key to turn it to minus just kind of tap these things off but a manual labor can't be avoided sometimes. Alright, I'll speed this up because this is painful to watch. Alright, so that's gonna work for me. I really like it. I still want to go in and fix a few of these little edges. It's the beads of water that are on the edges of giving a lumpy kind of sides photography trick. I don't do the photography much to do a lot of the retouching, but never keep it in the fridge because it ends up sweating and leaving big pools of water when you're trying to photograph it. So, what what tends to happen is one of the tricks that we've worked with. Lots with food photography is you leave it out. It's pretty much often ranked, but if you cover it in hairspray. Okay. It looks wet and moist and new and doesn't drip water beads everywhere. Okay. And kind of kind of preserves it for a while. So hairspray is a good trick. But we've got our mask. We want to output it to a layer mask, click. Ok. And I want to add this to focus area six. We're gonna use our trick where we go to our move to and just go command zee command and it brings to the layer mask. All right. So, it's in It's not super believable, but it's pretty cool though. I'm going to do two things before we go. We'll add a layer mask and one of the obvious problems is this glass and I'll show you a quick little trick for it. Let's do the drop shadow first. We learned this in the essentials course, but we'll just recover it here for the people that didn't do. It's pretty fancy. Well, I like it anyway, so I've got this layer selected. I'm going to go to effects. I'm going to say I'd like a drop shadow. I'm not worried about too much about this drop shadow. Um Except I want to see it Okay? Like that's not a realistic drop shadow. I know, but it's mainly just so I can see what it looks like and play around with the capacity, the size, how fuzzy it is. That's gonna work for me click OK? You're like that is terrible. But remember the people that did it, you know, you can right click the word. Drop shadow and go to this one that says create layer, cryptically named basically. It means I'm going to yank the drop shadow off as an effect and look at his own shadow on its own layer. So I'm just gonna move around and it means that we can go to edit, transform and go to distort. I'm just going to use the shortcut because we're in the advanced class, hit command t on your keyboard. If you're a Mac, control T on a PC. And then just hold down the command key on a Mac or control key on a PC. And instead of it just kind of like doing this. You hold down the command key or control key on a Pc. It just distorts it without having to go to the official edit distorted just kind of does it all for you. So what I'm looking for now is looking for the shadow on both the focus area focus area five. You can see there's a big shadow cast this way and in here it's pretty neutral. The photographer's probably composited this background anyway so it gives us lots of freedom to decide where the shadow is going to go. So I'm gonna transform it, I'm going to move it around. Maybe they're moving, I'm trying to get the base of it there, how how realistic this is going to be. Where is the light going to be coming from? I don't know whether it should be kind of coming from this way or this way. Ah Your dad's look awesome. Okay well it's okay it's okay I'm going to return and now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to do to a couple things. One is on this lady here, I'm going to play with a different, it's defaulted to multiply so I'm going to go through and just pick another blending mode. Remember holding shift on my keyboard, make sure you're on the move tool. Okay and then tap the plus key and it just cycles through the color modes over here and just looking for one that at least gets you close to where you want to be like that but it's probably not very I do like what linear burn does to the word. Can I find anything else that I like? No, maybe a linear light I like, but it needs to be kind of reduced, especially out here. It shouldn't be, it should be kind of maybe dark in here, but not further out. So what I like to do is just add a layer mask to the drop shadow. Make sure you're working on your mask, grab your paintbrush. Okay, just your beaky. I'm going to make sure that my blending mode is normal. We played around in an early editorial to change it to overlay. And in terms of the opacity, I'm just going to kind of like remove parts of it. But I want to turn the opacity of the brush down. We're gonna use our shortcut along the top of our keyboard. Just remember 1234, so maybe 30% capacity changes 40. Practice. Okay, so I'm just going to kind of build this out, Maybe even lower 10%. Just kind of clicking and dragging and working it. Especially maybe over here back there. I'm trying to make it look realistic. Alright, I'm okay with the shadow. Probably needs another bit of blurring so you can click on this, then go up to filter and use blue. We're going to do blue later on. But don't worry, everyone uses calcium blue. So do I You might just blur it up a bit more. So one of the other big obvious things I can see is that it's just got a blue cast to it. This backgrounds got quite a warm yellow feel to it whereas this has got quite a blue cast, it's making this stand out too much. So with this layer selected, let's even name it. Let's get crazy smoothie. Okay, and with it selected, let's go to adjustments and I'm gonna use carla balance. Which one is you there? He is there. Okay, second line second in and I'm just going to shift the blue to yellow now at the moment it's doing it to the whole thing. So if you click on this, remember it says I'm only going to affect the layer just underneath me which is smoothie. Now I'm just going to kind of warm it up, turn it on and off on and off. Yeah, getting there so maybe a bit more red than cyan. Got a little bit of green for the green smoothie. Do you like it? I feel like it sits in there a bit nicer. Next thing I'm gonna do is fix up this glass, it's like really bright compared to the background. It's not showing through any texture and you'll run into this problem with glass. Glass is tough for this so I'm gonna do a kind of a caveman fix. Just wanna show you what I would do now. Okay, so I'm gonna zoom in. What I wanna do is work on the mask. I'm going to use my paintbrush. I'm going to make a nice small brush. I'm going to have the capacity at Maybe 20%. How hard is it going to be hardness at zero? I want it nice and fluffy because what I want to do is I'm going to leave a lot of the whites. It's this great stuff. The blacks are good. The whites are good. Often when you're working with glass, it's the mid tones that are the background. So I'm just going to caveman it and do this. Just painting it out. Okay, so I'm just kind of painting it out in little parts. Why? Because it's showing through the background a little bit bringing through that kind of ready. Okay, that's in there. Okay, I'm just making the glass a bit more translucent. Total cheap track rather than getting too complicated about it. Changing the colors and stuff would work. But if we put it on a different background, at least this technique is going to show through the background a bit more. I might remove a little bit of the glass as well. I mean the highlights just to kind of lighten it up a little bit to show you what I mean, is remember we can hold down the option key on a Mac. Ok on a pc and just click on the mask and just see what I'm doing here. It's a pretty primitive bards, you can see it's just starting to kind of blend in a bit more. If I move the background, give it a name, you can see it just kind of move there and kind of takes on a bit of the background through it and that should be it. But this bottom down here is annoying me as well. There's like a weird reflection that just wouldn't happen on this desktop. I feel so you could work on the actual image and maybe darken it. I'm just gonna work on the layer mask because I don't want to destroy the image. Do the same thing with my brush tool. I'm just gonna kind of lower this a little bit. Just the bits I don't like. Then the wood kind of peek through. Alright, how much do I like it? I'm pretty happy I'm okay with that shadow doing weird stuff. One last thing I know there's just one last thing but the weird thing that happened, I created a new layer and because it was in between my adjustment layer and the image kind of did this weird thing where it became what's called a clipping mask for this image that happens all the time. Just drag underneath. Make sure that is still using this option connected to the bottom and my layer here is going to be extra shadow. I always find believability in doing just a little bit of black paint brushing. So brush I'm gonna have a capacity of maybe 50%. I'm going to use black. Another shortcut for you is see my foreground and background colour one is blue, one is white. Okay, so you can click on this to force it to go black and white, but you'll see there's my shortcut given away Dickie. Okay, so if I had decided to set it back to the default black and white X key toggles between the two, you can see over here X goes foreground background color and d just sets it back to black and white. So here we go. I'm just going to add this on its own layer. You can see it's kind of okay, but I probably want to set it to maybe multiply and maybe just lower the opacity of it down again. I like getting just that second kind of rung of super close shadow and then there's more kind of lofty shadow. Alright, okay, that's it for this one. Let's jump into the next video. I'm going to set you a goal to do stuff like this on your own, really ties together a lot of the stuff we're learning so far. So I'll see you there