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Lesson Info

Hacking Photoshop: Selections

Let's, do something simple. This is overly simple. This is beyond simple, but just people don't think about it all that often I find when making selections, people end up thinking about one tool or they try to go overly sophisticated here's just the simplest of hacks, I'm going to use the lasso tool to select this area the simplest thing would be, I wish that was like a real lasso with a real lasso like a cowboy has, you can pull the rope and a lasso closes and goes around whatever you have inside the lasso s o if I want that to be done, all I'm gonna do is make a selection with a lasso tool, and when I'm done, I'll come down here to not the quick selection tool, but the old school magic wand and with the magic juan tool moved my mouse into the area that I that is within the selection, but the area I don't want, then what you need to do is hold on the option key. All it means take away option on a mac ultimo windows because click and it's goingto use that to get rid of what is in the a...

rea you're clicking on from your selection, so in essence, is going to shrink the last out for you, and so often times I find the selected complex object with a simple background I just used the last so tool to do a very rough selection around it then a grandma magic wand tool hold down the option key ultima windows and I just click in the area that shouldn't be selected it removes that from the selection, giving me something much more usable and just a very simple idea. All right, that was great check check simple thing there are certain adjustments that are designed to color correct and images a hole but I find to be useful to apply in a different way we see if I can show you one of those here if I created adjustment layer, I can either go toe levels or curves there's a button called otto and you can determine what the auto button does by going to the side menu of your adjustment layer in the upper right corner of it up here and there's a choice called auto options the problem with auto is it usually looks at the entirety of your image and if you switch between these and get various results but it's thinking about the entirety of the image sometimes what I want to do is have it concentrate on a particular area and to do that I'm gonna end up making a selection of what's most important in this picture then I'll go in there and use auto and I'll try to get just that area to look it's best and actually something's weird because that mask didn't get filled in hold on a minute. What is? Oh, I already had my adjustment layer before I had my selection, I need to make a selection before the adjustment because that wasn't doing what was supposed to bring I'll goto levels, I had a selection active the moment I created that adjustment layer, it converted the selection into this mask, and now when I go here to auto options instead of looking at the entire image, it's only going to look at the area that was selected, and I can use that to have it calculate what I'd like done to this image, maybe in there click okay, but I only made that selection to have it think about that area to do its analysis. I didn't want it toe on ly apply to that area, I wanted to apply to the entire picture based on that area, so when I'm done, all I'm going to do is take that mask and either throw it away by dragging it to trash or if I actually want to use the mask or something, I'll just go up to the edit menu and say, phil, and I'll tell it to fill it with white, white allows it to apply to the entire picture, so now it could affect the entire image. So the idea is sometimes my picture like the time of most used this is let's say I have an old faded photograph half in the old faded photograph has a border though and that border is like the white sheet of paper that the print was actually printed on the photographic paper and beyond that it's a little drop shadow where it was casting a shadow on the lid to my scanner or something and I don't want to get rid of those elements but those particular elements would influence on automatic adjustment like auto levels so I make a selection of an interior portion of the image I apply auto levels to it and then I either throw away the mask or I fill it with uh white in this particular case but I think I want to do is I like the look in the bottom of the photograph but I don't like the top so what I'll do is I'll end up adding a mask and so with the grady in tool active I have my mask active click where I think it's stops looking bad so at the top I think it stops looking bad about here and I'll drag tour I think it looks good so it's going to create a transition in there for me or I might just drag a much longer distance to get a much more gradual look to it me try from way up here there we go and let's see what the before and after looks like I'll just hide this layer here is before it just looked kind of too foggy for me everywhere and here's after where it kind of fades into more of a full contrast image but the main thing is I was using an automated feature like auto levels but I didn't want to think of the entire picture so I made a selection before I used auto levels and then what happens is the moment you're done in that auto levels dialog box it's not going to re calculate the adjustment so you can change the mask you could throw it away you've already influenced what part of the image it was analyzing when it was applying that so you can do whatever you want to the mask it was on ly needed to be there a tte the moment you hit autumn ask and messed with those options so there's my before am I after all right sometimes I like to do demos where I describe how photoshopped thinks about colors behind the scenes and in doing so I use an image not too similar to this one but what I end up showing is how photoshopped creates all your images out of red green blue light in in order to prove that any image can be made out of red, green and blue light I end up taking this image and somehow magically separated into red green and blue and I could do that to multiple images on the screen, and I could just very quickly pull him apart. I could take a photograph and separate it into red, green and blue, and then I can combine those back together to show you that when you put them back together, it becomes a full color image again we'll have after you do that well, let's find out I mean, to revert this image to it's original and then I'm gonna flatten it so that it's a ziff I don't have anything special set up and let's see, how could you take any image you want in separated into the components of red, green and blues? You, khun, drag it around this give me useful for all sorts of things, but it's primarily for me, useful when teaching and everybody always ask me how I do it. So that's, why I wanted to share here in general, the channels panel usually shows you where you are you seeing red light? We're using green light and we're using blue light. What I want to do is do something to convert those channels into layers that act in a similar fashion, so in order to accomplish that, I'm going to click on the first channel that's there, the red channel and I'm gonna load it is a selection there are a couple different ways of loading those a selection one of them is to hold on the command key control and windows into click on the thumbnail for that layer you'll get a selection then I'm going to go to my layers panel and I'm gonna create what's called a solid color layer and I'm going to tell it to use red in fact I'd usually type in the highest number you can get for red and zero for the other colors to make sure I got it to be precise then I'm gonna hide that layer so it doesn't influence the look of the image I'm going to repeat the process coming down here to the green channel command clicking on its thumb now the loaded as a selection and then go to my layers in say solid color layer in this time I'm going to pick green but make sure that the numbers are zeros for red and blue I'll hide that layer and I'm just going to do it for the last channel which was blue command click my layers solid color get blue but make sure that the numbers are appropriate highest number you can get for for blue and zero for the others then in order to reconstruct the image what I'll end up doing is all turn on all those layers I'll take the bottom layer which contains my original and I'm just going to fill it with black then these layers in order to get them to act like light, I'm going to select them. The bottom of the three layers has already selected. I'll hold shift and get the top, and all I need to do is change the blending mode of the top of my layers panel I'm gonna change it to a choice that is called screen, and now the image should look like the original looked just like the original, but if I target the green layer, I can now use the move tool and move it, move it, I ca n't target the red channel, we're not channel layer and move it. I ended up selecting those layers without clicking on because I had this hidden the way you do that is go to the most, read the most green or the most blue area, and when you're in the move tool, hold on the command key and click if you command click when you're in the move tool, it targets the top most layer that contains something there, so if I command, click on the green, I can make that active and move it. If I command, click on the red eye could make it active and move it by command click on the blue I could do the same. And the only difference is faras getting these others on two separate layers as I would need to copy them onto separate layers I needed kind of do them separate you could say where I did the same process for this probably either on sound document or right here duplicate this layer and then in this mask hide everything else except for that one little element you just have to a little bit more work to make those separate where these aren't all the same layers, but the main thing was to convert it into ah channel into a layer I command click on the channel to get a selection I do a solid color layer for that particular color and I sent it to screen mode do that to all of your channels and you get this toe work fine. The one thing you're going to run into that you're going to forget is when you create one of these layers before you do the next channel, make sure you turn off its eyeball so if I just created the layer called red before I go back and do the next channel, turn off the eyeball for that layer and so that whenever you're going to the channels panel to command, click on a channel that the on ly layer that's active is your original picture otherwise it's not gonna work right and that's usually what you get messed up