More Selection Tools
Lesson 9 from: FAST CLASS: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential TrainingMark Wallace
More Selection Tools
Lesson 9 from: FAST CLASS: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential TrainingMark Wallace
Lesson Info
9. More Selection Tools
Lessons
How To Open Files
01:10 2Using The Home Screen
01:49 3Exploring The Interface
02:36 4Understanding Workspaces
03:04 5Tools and The Options Bar
01:56 6Finding Hidden Tools
02:31 7How to See What You’re Working On
06:19 8Selecting Things
07:06More Selection Tools
10:34 10Testing the Magic Wand and Quick Selection Tools
03:55 11The History Palette – Undoing Things
02:47 12Menu and Item Shortcut Keys
02:28 13Non-Destructive Editing
02:14 14Working with Layers
09:11 15Groovy 3 Exercise
10:38 16Layer Effects and Styles
04:25 17Layer Masks – Karen on Beans
06:41 18Using Adjustment Layers
04:36 19Using Filters
03:06 20Advanced Compositing Using Layers
07:42 21Non-Destructive Editing Techniques
03:17 22Understanding Smart Objects
05:16 23Smart Sharpen
04:36 24Understanding Histogram
04:08 25Adjusting Curves
03:46 26The Healing Brush Tools
07:28 27The Clone Stamp Tool
05:24 28The Burn and Dodge Tools
03:41 29Neural Filters
07:52Lesson Info
More Selection Tools
Okay, so over here on the left hand side we have our rectangular and elliptical marquee tool that we just worked with. We have some more advanced tools just underneath that. And so right underneath that the first thing we have is the lasso tool. Now lasso tool is great because you can just lasso stuff. It's like using a rope. So I can go in here and using my pin tool or you can use your mouse. I'm going to lasso just, I'm gonna draw around. Juana's face to select that. And you can see that this is something that would be impossible to do with just those old tools. And like we had before you can do the same modifier keys so I can hit the plus key and say, hey, include that, that I missed. You can hit the option key to subtract. Maybe you did something there. Subtract that section. Oops, I messed that up. Let me go here and draw this in to add to the selection. And then you can go in, you can cut this out if you want, or you can copy, so I'm gonna copy that. I'm gonna copy another one. I...
'm gonna copy another one. I'm gonna copy another one. And so you can see that you can make really fast changes to your image. Now I'm going to deselect that. So the lasso tool allows you to really get in and copy and select items that are irregular shape but maybe you need even more control. So instead of the lasso, I'm gonna click on the lasso and I'm gonna go to the polygon lasso tool. And so to do this what I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom in. So I'm gonna double click my magnification window and grab my hand by hitting the space bar. I'm gonna zoom in to Juana's eye. I'm even gonna go a little bit more than that. So I'm gonna go here to, oh, maybe 200%. So I'm way in on Juan's eye there. And I'm gonna grab this, the polygon lasso tool. And instead of just lassoing and just clicking and drawing I can click a point and then move to a little bit. And I move a little bit more. So what I can do here is I can get the point here and then see that's holding on. So I can go to the next little point that I need and then go to the next little point and then go to the next point. And you can see how I can really precisely go through here and select this. So I'm just gonna do this really quickly, but if I needed this to be perfect, I could take a little bit more time, but that's what this tool does. Okay, so I just, and I'm gonna close that up. Now I have my selection. If I double click the hand and select that out, you can see that I have selected her eye pretty much exactly, that's really cool. I'm gonna hit control D to deselect that. So we have the lasso tool, the polygon lasso tool and then this other one, the magnetic lasso tool. So years ago, this was the bee's knees. So it was awesome. So what this does is you can draw and Photoshop will look for an edge and if it's sees an edge it will magnetically snap your selection to that edge. And so let me zoom in here to an area that has an edge. So maybe over here, oops, I've got the wrong. I'm gonna zoom in here to Juana's shoulder. You can see that edge is sort of okay. I'm gonna use one of her faces. I think that's a better edge. So I've got one of these faces. Maybe I wanna select that again so I can grab this magnetic lasso tool. And as long as I'm close to an edge if I click and drag along see how that just magically snaps to that edge. You gotta be close though. So I can sort of drag that around. Now, if I mess it up, like I did you can always go in and add to or subtract from the selection, but there's even more powerful tools now in Photoshop for selecting things. So what I'm going to do here, double click the hand so I can see everything. And then underneath the lasso tool and all those tools we have three more tools, the object selection tool the quick selection tool and the magic wand tool. So let's talk about how each of these things work. So first, what I want to do is reset this image. So I'm going to close this image, don't save and then reopen Juana dot JPEG and then unlock this layer. So we have a fresh clean image. And then what we're gonna do is start working with these other advanced tools. So let's start with the quick selection tool. Now what the quick selection tool does is as you paint Photoshop is going to look for areas that are the same basic color and it's gonna select those. And so I can start over here in the left hand side. And as I paint, notice that it's saying, oh yeah this is a solid area. I'm gonna paint up here above her head. And then I'm gonna paint over here to the right and whoa, what happened? Well, if you look Juana's hair and the background are very, very similar in color. And so Photoshop is saying, hey, these look the same to me and so it's selecting all of that stuff. Now, what you can do is we can go in here and we can make this brush smaller by hitting the left bracket. And then I can hit the option or alt key to say, hey, select this area. And I'm gonna sort of work with this but you can see for this image, this is, you know it can select something pretty quickly. It doesn't do a very good job. You need a lot of contrast for the quick selection tool here to work well. All right, let's look at something else that is called the magic wand tool. So what I'm gonna do is deselect hit control or command D and the magic wand tool. What it does is you can click an area in the image and Photoshop will say, okay I'm looking at this specific color and I'm gonna select everything that is that color. And so at the top at the options bar you'll see that we have a sample size five by five three by three, 11 by 11. And so what that is, is it's saying how many of these pixels, the dots that make up an image do you want to choose as your sample? And so what I'm saying is I'm gonna choose a three by three average. It's a pretty small sample. If I wanted a larger sample I would do a little bit larger sample. So we're just gonna stick by three by three. It's a pretty good starting place. The other thing here is the tolerance. In other words, it's saying, if I select a shade of blue how far off of that shade of blue, can I go? What's the tolerance? Does it have to be exactly that shade? If so, the tolerance would be zero. I'm only selecting that specific shade. If it's maybe 30 or 40, it's saying that shade of blue may be a little bit lighter maybe a little bit darker. You're saying how much leeway do I have to go when I select that color? And then the other thing we want to choose is contiguous or non-contiguous. So contiguous says, if I select a color select everything that that's color unless it doesn't connect. And so if maybe you're in a square you click anything in that square will be selected. If it's outside that square and it's the same color it's not gonna be selected. If I don't have that, if it discontiguous is not selected it just looks at the whole image and chooses everything. So let's learn how that works. So I'm gonna say contiguous, and then I'm gonna go here and I'm gonna choose this sort of dark area right here. I'm gonna click on that. Bam and it selects all this stuff in the image. It selects everything that is a similar color. And it also selected Juana's hair because it thinks it's the same color, but notice it didn't select anything inside. So once it hits these borders, so her body is the border. It's not selecting anything the same color inside. So now let's do the same thing. I'm going to deselect that I'm gonna deselect, contiguous and select again. Bam, now notice that this border of the change in color. Her skin and her arm, it's selecting inside that. It's saying, I don't care if it's connected or not. I'm gonna select everything that is that color. And it selects all this stuff. If we go, let's make the tolerance to something like 10. So we're taking how it'll tolerate the different color variations. If I click notice, now it doesn't select as much of her hair. It doesn't select this lighter area here. And so it's doing a little bit better job. It's not selecting what we want necessarily because those colors are very, very similar. So what I can do here is I can again say, add this little part, add this little part, subtract this color right here. So it's just choosing colors. If you don't see the object selection tool in your toolbar you can always go down here to these three dots the ellipses and edit the toolbar and add that. So it might not be in your toolbar if you don't see it, make sure you add that, like we talked about earlier. So, okay, I'm gonna go up here to this object selection tool and I'm gonna tell Photoshop, I wanna select Juana. I'm just gonna drag the square around her. And that's what I wanna do. Photoshop is now gonna think about it and watch what happens. This is sort of magic. So it looks at the image and bam, it does a pretty darn good job. So all those issues that we had before, where Juana's hair or it's very similar to the color of the background this eliminates a lot of those issues and it fixes things. You'll notice if we zoom in way down here you'll see that it didn't get this little part of Juana's pants because it's so similar. But look, we can take this object selection tool. We can hit the shift button. We can say, hey, select this little area and add it. And it adds it when, hey, didn't did it. So add that and we can just keep doing that until it adds everything in. And then we'll have a really nice clean selection. I'm gonna zoom out and you can see that we have Juana selected and we did it with just a couple of clicks. It's the object selection tool in my book is the best option for selecting this stuff. It's really, really awesome.
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