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Select Mask & Changing a Color using Photoshop - Color Range

Hi there in this video, we're going to look at color range to do selections, selecting bananas. We're going to select blueberries and combine them into this magical scene and eventually into this kind of mess of things that are created to explore color range because it's an often overlooked masking technique. You might have used it to do a specific job, but it can be used for so many things. That's what we'll explore in the next couple of videos. If you've used color range already, go through these videos because there's quite a few little shortcuts and tips will use throughout the rest of the course. So let's get started. Alright to get started. Let's go to file. Let's go to open in your exercise files is a folder called selections and masking. I want you to open up color range and three. We're going to start with color range one. Now, before we get started, I've picked a pretty easy example, pretty consistent color. It's gonna be a good way to understand color range if you've never ...

used it before. But later in the course, what we'll do is we'll combine color range often with other selection techniques because it gets like maybe 80% of the selection and you need to do touch ups with other selections. And it's going to be a big difference between saying my essentials course and the advanced course, we're going to start smashing things together where there's times where you can't just do one selection technique, you need to kind of do two or three or four. So let's understand color range. Let's go to select and go to color range yours by default. Probably just looks like that. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're going to click anywhere in the banana and it kind of gives us a kind of a basic selection of the yellow under here where it says select yours might have defaulted to one of these colors. I find these never work, never ever. So I find it best just to ignore these and go straight to sample the color. Have the fuzziness at about 100. I never really changed that because what happens right if I click in here and increase the fuzziness basically it's going to reach out and it's quite good cause you can see it's going out further, further, further, further further but to get the whole banana and eventually it just goes too far and starts grabbing the background right now. In this case it didn't get any of it. Okay, so I'm gonna click around so the fuzziness just kind of expands the selection. I find out just leave the fuzziness at 100. And what I do is I start with an initial color and then use this little plus icon and click once, click twice click again. And what you can do is that clicking and just keep clicking, you can click hold and drag across stuff just clicking, holding and dragging and give it a little bit of color. You'll notice that when I let go it's grabbed a large chunk of that. Yellow hasn't got these little end parts, I can start clicking on these but often there's there's some colors that actually match the background, so I'm just gonna tidy those up with the paintbrush if you do go too fast. So you're clicking in here and you click on something. Can you see it started picking the background? Okay. It's a little bit hard to see, I guess in this video, but I can see it here clearly. I grabbed the minus tool and then clicking the background to get rid of stuff I don't want. Plus click back in here again, I'm going to click and drag and give it a wriggle, it picks up a bunch of colors. Let's click OK? And it's got a pretty good selection. The two ends need a little tidy up but let's add a mask by clicking the red mask button so to tidy up the edges here, make sure you're working on your mask, not your image. Okay? And let's zoom in find the edge here and I'm going to paint this in. So I'm going to try and introduce lots of shortcuts, especially at the beginning, so it makes the rest of this class flow a lot faster. You have to bear with me a little bit in these first few videos to kind of get them into our system so that we can go faster later on because what I wanna do is working on the mask. I want to paint this out and brush size up the top. Here I go along here and I drag it up and down and I do this right, mm hmm. You might know the shortcut of the And I do that. The square brackets. Okay. It's next to your peaky. That makes it bigger and smaller. But there is a super amazing extra one on a Mac. You hold down the command key and the option key. I'll do the PC industry because it's quite different. Okay, so hold down command and option on your keyboard and then click and hold down your mouse key and drag it left and right. And that does the size. I love this one means I can go really big and really small really quickly. And if I use the up and the down, can you see it does the hardness as well. So it's the same keys held down. I can really get into the right size and the right hardness. If you're a pc, it's quite different. Okay, You hold down the alt key on your keyboard and then you click and hold down and drag the right mouse button. The one you never use, hold down the old key, click hold and drag left and right, and you get the same thing up and down, does the hardness. It's really weird shortcut, but really good ones. And know there will be a shortcut sheet at the end of this course. Okay, like all kind of together in a nice little video. There will also be a pdf on that same page there where you can download it and print it off and stick an extra computer. So I'm on my Mac. I'm holding down control and clicking and dragging left and right to get the rough size and then hardness wise I love about anywhere between 85 95 especially when I want a straight edge. I never have 100% why? Because there's always a little bit of give around the outside. It looks more natural. 100% hardness. Just looks too fake. Another cool little shortcut is at the moment mines foreground is set to black when I paint this. It kind of does the wrong thing. Right. I want to do the opposite of that. So what you can do another cool little shortcut is the X key on your keyboard. See my foreground and background color here. Okay, if I tap X, just the letter X. On my keyboard, it just toggles the foreground and background color. So I wait at the front and I'm going to point this out, smaller brush size. Hold down my shortcuts, you can see with a few little shortcuts you are going to be retouching master. If you go too far easy, I can zoom in and X key to switch it to black is my foreground color and just paint that out. I do the same thing with this bottom but I'm going to leave this in here because it looks good in my final composition. But you could now use the same thing black and just paint it out at the top here. Is this what I want. So I'm going to switch it back to white is my foreground color. You can see how handy it is. One of those ones worth learning nice and that my friends is using the color range to mask an image. We have to use a little bit of brush tool to kind of fill in these black parts but that's just part of Photoshop. Very really does a tool do all the work for you. So we're gonna do a lot of combinations in this course. What I'd like to do is grab my move tool, click and hold and drag, drag, drag, drag, drag, drag, drag into the number three and let it go down the bottom here and we're gonna move it down here is we'll fix it up a little bit more later on, let's learn a little bit more about color range. Let's go to color range to go back to our select and we're going to go to color range two things I want to show you one is the localized color clusters. What that means is if I grab my eyedropper tool and click on so I want this guy but I don't want all of his friends, I just want him plus another fella here. You can see It's gone off and pick them all because they're the same color. That's what that's localized colour clusters comes in and your range is probably set to 100%. It means it's just grabbing everything and you lower it down. You can start to see kind of zeroes in on our little guy there so it doesn't grab everything in the document. Now we're using fruit like this would be super useful if you are say trying to select. So you want to do some adjustments to the lipstick color but not the shoes, which are quite similar. You could click on the lipstick, lower the range down and make that selection and we'll ignore the other. Say read things in the document or in our case blueberries, you can add more than one hit this little plus icon here and I want you and you know it's picked two of these fellas. I need to tidy both of them up and that brings me on to the second thing I wanted to show you in here and is this one here, It says selection preview beyond grayscale because this little window here is far too small for working and all it really does is that it just duplicates this into the window here, hasn't changed anything. It's just kind of showing us how the selection works zoom in and this fella here, I want to add some of that and some of that clicking clicking. Getting there clicking and dragging can be super useful and if you get too much of the background okay. I might go in here and say minus one. A minus a bit of that. Okay, fix up this one as well, grab the plus key and just kind of drag across there. Great to have it as well. You can click to click away to your heart's content or click and drag. I'm gonna click this background here, I want to get rid of it. It's pretty good. The range is probably too far now so I have to lower that range so that it's picking just this little area in here. Doing something weird there. Can I minus it out? I can. Nice. Alright, let's click. Ok. Let's add a layer mask and like I had before, it's done a lot of the blue but there's some bits I want to touch up basically, I've got a really good edge but there's some metal bits that the colors were just too different. So the mask selected to be on my keyboard for the brush tool. I'm gonna use a lot of shortcuts if I hover above this. Can you see? It says the brush tool and anything in the brackets here means use the B. Key. Okay. This one here is the wiki, you can see it in brackets there. So the ones that you use the most you'll learn so you can just go V to move B for brush my brush sizes. Okay. Okay. I'm just going to tidy up not too far. Tidy up the bits that didn't get perfectly selected. Same with this one. Nice because we're using that localized color. You might find that there might have been some other kind of ghost bits out here. You might have to tidy up. Okay, so you could use your X key to make it black. And just grab a nice big brush and just kind of tidy up any of these bits that are part of the mask that you don't want. Alright, let's click hold and drag this little guy. So I moved to drag it to color range three and let's dump a cup of blueberries in awesome. That's how to use color range to select physical objects and kind of cut them out onto a white background. It would be great if you're a photographer or you do it. You're shooting stuff for a website and just want to kind of like grab something and put it onto a transparent background or a white background. Just delete the background color range, especially if there's a color that's very contrast compared to the rest of the document. It can be super helpful and often overlooked in Photoshop. It's getting to the next video. We're going to still use color range but we're going to use it in a very different kind of way more for color adjustment. All right, I'll see you in the next video.