Basic selections tools in Photoshop
Lesson 15 from: Basics of Adobe CC: Photoshop, Illustrator & InDesignJason Hoppe
Basic selections tools in Photoshop
Lesson 15 from: Basics of Adobe CC: Photoshop, Illustrator & InDesignJason Hoppe
Lessons
Class introduction
04:04 2Key Features of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator & InDesign
11:04 3Best Project Uses for Photoshop, Illustrator & InDesign
17:45 4Create a streamlined workflow In Creative Cloud
16:55 5Q&A: Deciding which program fo use for your project
22:08 6Illustrator File setup
05:09 7Use Basic Drawing & Selection Tools in Illustrator
21:38 8Work with Layers in Illustrator
04:00Adding & Manipulating Type in Illustrator
07:39 10Pathfinder & Color Tools in Illustrator
27:08 11Create a logo In Illustrator
07:49 12Illustrator Output
09:23 13Understand Pixels & Resolution in Photoshop
10:53 14Use Color Modes & Color Correction in Photoshop
19:29 15Basic selections tools in Photoshop
07:29 16Use Basic Layers in Photoshop
31:15 17Save files & Understand file formats in Photoshop
14:46 18Create files in InDesign
03:16 19Add & Edit Type in InDesign
20:55 20Create Multiple Pages in InDesign
12:36 21Place Images & Logos in InDesign
18:05 22Complete an InDesign Project with Type & Logos
13:42 23Output & Print in InDesign
08:53Lesson Info
Basic selections tools in Photoshop
Now with Photoshop, the big thing is people want to create things in Photoshop. They want to do things in Photoshop. If you want to start doing things in Photoshop, you gotta learn how to do selections. If you've ever painted a room, or getting ready for paint, you always go and tape off the areas that you don't want to put paint on, right? Everybody understands that. And hopefully if you did a really good job at taping, your painting job goes really good. The exact same thing is true with Photoshop. When you want to paint a room, you mask out everything, and when you go in and want to do something in Photoshop, you gotta do a really good selection because with an image, all this is made up of is little tiny pixels and so there are times when we want to go in and we want to isolate something so that we apply a filter or a color correction to just that area so we can do something with it and leave everything else untouched. I've got several images in here and I'd like to go in and I wan...
na target one of these here. Let's see what we have here that we can actually do. Actually, we're gonna stick with the cheesecake. We have some very basic selection tools that we can use to target areas. When we put a selection around an area in Photoshop, that means that's whatever inside the selection is what we can work with. Everything else we can't touch. So I could go in and I would like to isolate these strawberries here so I can do something with them free of everything else in my image. I've got several different ways of doing that. Keeping in mind that because my entire image is made up of pixels, I need to go in there and select all those pixels, and just those pixels. We all know when you paint, if you do a bad job at taping, you know what it looks like when you take the tape off. Photoshop, exactly the same. Bad selections, bad results. Awesome selections, awesome results. Right. We're gonna shoot for some place in between here. Something that doesn't take an hour to select but something that's gonna look good. So I would love to go in and I would like to isolate these two strawberries here, and my selection tools that I have here, I have the lasso tool, the polygon lasso tool and the magnetic lasso tool. The lasso tool, I go in and I can draw around here. The problem is when I put my selection around there and let go, I'm done. Very hard to get a really good selection around the object, and when you're done, when you try to do something and you click some place else, you'll lose that selection. Of course, a bad selection is gonna end up with bad results from that selection. If I use my polygon lasso tool, this is a lot more forgiving. I can go in and I can put my selection around my object and this allows me to work a little bit easier. Put the selection around my object so we can isolate this. And once I isolate this, I can then go in and once I put my selection around there, if I were to do anything, it only effects what's inside my selection. That's it. So if I were to go in and do my hue and saturation here, I could go in and I could change that. What's ever inside the selection is what's affected. Everything else is not touched. And in Photoshop there are so many things that we have to, we want to make sure that we do it to some things and not the others. That's what a selection does for us. But going in and making the selection look good and then actually doing any type of adjustment inside that selection, we need to go in and we need to do a really good selection. And we actually have complete videos on how to master selections. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've got a video on ways to go ahead and select things because it's tricky. We have a couple other ones that people love to use, and one of them is the magic wand tool. People love the magic wand tool. They click and it selects everything, but it doesn't work like they really expect. I'm gonna show you how it works really well, but I'm also gonna show you how we can use the quick selection tool, which is really good for going in and quickly selecting objects so that you can isolate them to do whatever you want to with them. The quick selection tool, we can go in and we can control the size of our quick selection tool. We go up into our control bar, we have our little cursor right here and the drop down. These are called brushes, they've always been called brushes, kind of a misnomer but for those of us who have used Photoshop for 7,000 years, they're brushes. (laughs) So I'm gonna adjust the size down and what I can do with this, the quick selection tool is fantastic. I can click and I can drag over or click multiple times and staying within what I want, I can then go in and select my items by clicking and dragging over them. Now because this is a semi-automatic tool here, I've gone and I've put this all together and now I have too much selected because I don't want that whole area. Not a problem. I can go up to my control bar here and I can grab my subtract and I get my little minus inside my cursor there and I can drag over all those areas that I don't want and it truly is magical. I mean it's like it goes in and it does that beautifully. I need to add that back. I can go in click on my add, click on those add those back. I can control the size of my brush. Make it a little bit smaller, and go in there and isolate my objects pretty good. The key to every selection is doing a really selection around it. And if you've never used Photoshop and you're trying to make your selection look good and you like "is this a good selection?" Well, this is how you can tell. Whenever you do a selection, we've got this refine edge feature. And whenever we do a selection up here in our control bar, no matter what tool we used for our selection, we have the ability to make that selection look better. But I don't know how this is actually gonna look when I'm done. That's where the refine edge tool comes in. So if I click the refine edge, it'll open it up in it's own little refine edge panel and I can actually see what it looks like isolated from everything else. I can go in here and make my selection a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller around my object. I can also smooth out that selection a little bit so I can have a softer selection so it doesn't look like I actually went in with a pair of scissors around my object. That feather is going to soften that transition between there, so if I do a color change or whatever, it doesn't look like it's a really hard edge. It's gonna give us a nice soft edge. When I click okay, my selection looks a little bit better. And if I want to do a levels or a curves or anything on there, hue and saturation, it's just gonna happen right inside that selected area. So if I do a hue and saturation, I can go and I can desaturate those completely. Look at that. I now have black and white strawberries. It looks like meatballs, doesn't it? (laughs) Now it looks like a meatball cheesecake. Right there? Naw, not really what I want. But I could use my hue and saturation to change the color of them so I could have blueberry strawberry cheesecake.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
user 1398976626171314
Such an important overview that clarifies and simplifies each piece of software and its role in achieving a beautiful and organized end result. Love Jason's brilliant and funny style and I appreciate his going into the "whys" of the software design evolution so it's not just memorizing methods but truly understanding what you can do even with a eye to the future changes. Fascinating, fun and empowering! My first Creative Live purchase!
Renee Hamilton
Enjoying this class immensely. Havent used illustrator properly for a while but this class is refreshing my memory. Its so awesome and it makes illustrator seem so easy! Wow wow wow! Thank you Jason and Creative live
Corrine Radergraham
WOW!! Jason is a very engaging instructor. It's obvious that he knows the programs inside and out. He imparts a tremendous amount of excellent material in a very short time, he makes sense and he is well-spoken with a sense of humor and he doesn't get lost in the materials and have to bungle his way out, very well prepared. I've been using PS and IA for the past several years on and off and currently have 6 on my computer but looking at going to CC in the near future. Even with that experience, he provided tips and tricks for both that were very enlightening in using them more productively. I'm not so familiar with ID and I now feel that I have a working knowledge of all three programs. I've taken Adobe classes taught by other instructors and found them rather boring to drag myself through. Jason is not boring in the least! So if you aren't familiar with these programs or are even curious about them and want an excellent overview, I totally recommend that you take this class. You will definitely not be sorry and will get your money's worth. I took this when it was offered on air free of charge. The only down of taking it free is that there are downloadable materials that are only available by purchase which sound excellent and I would like to have them, but I want to take one of Jason's other classes and can't justify the expense of this class only for the downloads, because I am familiar with the programs and would be unlikely to actually watch the class again, and there is his interactive pdf class that I am really looking forward to......5 stars and all thumbs up for Jason's instruction!
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Related Classes
Adobe Photoshop