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Making Selections
Making selections. I will press command or control W to close that and I'm not gonna save it. We'll go back to our grid here and we're gonna take this lovely lady and add her to the Paris photo. I'll select her and then command click this Paris photo to get that selected. And I'll click the editor. We'll start with her. We're gonna just make a quick selection of her. The tool that I like to use for that when I'm working with elements is to grab this one right here. This is called the quick selection tool. With this active, we can see some other tool family members that sorta count along with the quick selection tool, including this one that is that auto selection tool. If I click on this, I could do a really quick scribble and then let's see what's it gonna do. It did a pretty good job. This area has some shadows that we'd have to fix. Let's get in there and see if we can clean that up a little bit. We'll clean it up using the quick selection brush. I'm gonna zoom in by pressing comman...
d or control space bar and click dragging to define a zoom area. I can scroll around my image by holding down the space bar and dragging a little bit. We have some spots that it definitely didn't get. I'm gonna use the quick selection brush. Over here, I'm gonna tell it I want it to add to the existing selection. We don't need to start from scratch. We'll just add to the selection. If I just click and drag right here, it's going to sort of smartly snap to the edges that it needs to. Great, now we can just kinda work our way around the image. When you're selecting something like this, now there I went too far. Now I would hold down the option key, which switches it to subtract. Then I would just do a little scribble through here and just shave that off. When you're doing these types of selections to take something from one image and put it into another, you're better off cutting into the image a little bit. In this case, having her, having her, maybe I cut off the edge of her blouse or something and that's okay. It's not gonna affect this. In some cases, you have to be more careful. Again, I went too far so I'm just gonna command or control Z to undo that and try it again. Sometimes, if you make shorter strokes, you get a better result. Again, it went too far so this time I'll undo it and switch tools. We'll just manually paint this. That's the selection brush right here. If I want to, I can also work in something called mask mode, which is great because then I can actually see what my selection is looking like versus when I'm painting in selection mode, you just see marching ants and I can't really tell what's selected and what's not. Sometimes, it can be nice to work in mask mode and I can lower the overlay so I can see a little bit better. Right now, I wanna add to this selection. I'm gonna use this paintbrush and just paint. Then I don't have to worry about the wizardry of what it's trying to read or not read. We'll scroll up here a little bit. It also helps when you're making selections. It helps to know what you're gonna do with the image because depending on where you're putting it, you may need to be really careful with your selection or you may be able to get away with kinda being a little more sloppy about it, depending what the background looks like that you're putting it into, et cetera. Alright, here I colored a little bit out of bounds but I'm just gonna do a bit of a clean up. I'll go back to the subtract option. There we go. Fixed that. I think unless there's any massively glaring mistakes, I think we're pretty good. I might fix her hair a little bit right here by adding. Basically, we're using these tools, whichever one, you just switch back and forth between adding and subtracting in order to end up with the selection that you want. Mask right here is just another way to view what is otherwise called marching ants. We can also click 'refine edge'. Here we can view in a number of different ways 'cause we're in expert mode so we can view with an overlay that we saw or we can view in black and white. This just helps us evaluate our selection a little bit more. We'll go ahead and stick with what we've got here. We'll just up the smart radius a little bit and click 'okay'. That's just gonna help Photoshop do a better job of evaluating the edges. Now we've got her selected. What I'm gonna do is again, copy and paste, command or control C, and I'll click over on this Eiffel Tower photo and command or control V to paste her in. She's gonna land rather large. She's living large in Paris. Now that's a good thing. You'd rather have something like that come in and be too big than if it's too small. If it's too big, we can work with it. If it's too small, it's not gonna work to enlarge it. To make it smaller, we'll press command or control T to bring up that free transform again. Now we can't actually see the bounding box because it's so big. To scoot back, I'm gonna press command or control minus a few times 'til I can see what I'm working with here. I'm gonna hold, I don't have to hold shift. I can just drag from the edge to just tuck her down so she's not quite so big. I can zoom back in to see my work a little better by pressing command or control plus. There we go. You just kinda have to work with it. I'm loving something about like that. When I'm happy with the transformation, we'll go ahead and hit the check mark. To tie this all together and make it look less of a cut and paste job, we're gonna add in a special effect called a gradient map. Over in the layers panels here, we're going to merge these layers down. Actually, we don't even need to merge it. We'll just add what's called an adjustment layer up here. We've got our background layer. We've got our layer one. We're gonna click this funny thing right here. It looks almost like a yin yang. It's a half black, half white circle. We'll click on that. This is an icon that represents something called adjustment layers. One of the adjustments that it has is something called a gradient map. A gradient is a fancy word for a transition of color. You can have a gradient that goes from red to yellow and somewhere in between would then also be orange. It's a transition of color. It can be two colors, ten colors, 100 colors. There's all different ways it can be. When we click to add the gradient map, we get this gradient map box and it has a preset gradient right here. We can click this down arrow. The one that I'm gonna select from this preset defaults is this purple to orange. When I click on that, I get this cool effect. I'm gonna close that now. I'm done with the gradient map. Then I can adjust how this is interacting in my image. I might wanna come up here to the opacity. Maybe I wanna lower the opacity. Maybe that's a little bit too strong. I could also experiment with changing the blend modes. Maybe I want it in multiply. That has a bit of a different look. Another good one to try might be overlay. I'm really thinking that personally, I like normal with just a lowered opacity. The difference between a gradient, you may notice if you click on this little adjustment layer button, there's a gradient and a gradient map. What we did was gradient map. The difference is that a gradient is just going to overlay a transition of color across the image. A gradient map is going to map the tones of the gradient to the tones in your image. Because our gradient map, if I double click right here, our gradient map goes on the left from purple to orange. The left side is the colors of the shadows and the highlights in the image get the orange. If we boost this back to 100 percent, that's why everything in the image that would be black is purple and everything that would be white or a lighter color is orange. It's mapping the colors of the gradient to the tones in the image and it's a cool effect. I encourage you to check that out and play with that.
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