Lessons

Lesson Info

Selections: Marquees

So one of the I think most powerful tools and people often I think when they're new to photo shop and they learn about the marquee selection tools there like, when would I ever use that you're just going to draw a circle or draw a rectangle or like, how is that handy? They are probably, at least for me, one of the most used tools. So I'll show you why, in this case, we're going to select this little fish and put him somewhere else. Um, so we're gonna be using the marquee selection tools. They are the M family M for Mark Eat. There are four of them, but the keyboard shortcut applies only to to, and those would be the rectangular and the elliptical one. So we want the elliptical marquee, so I'm going to click to select that. And as with all of the selection tools, you can create new selections, add two selections, subtract or even intersect selection. So you you definitely want to keep an eye on what's happening up here. So when I'm making a new selection will have that as a new selectio...

n and the way the marquee tool works, you just click and drag, and it makes a circle or an oval or I guess, in the lips. So if you want a perfect circle, you can hold the shift key and draw out a perfect circle. What we are actually going to be doing is not in this image, but rather over here. Do you see where this is going? I kind of feel a little guilty about this one, so I'm going to click and drag with the marquee tool to select the inside of this coffee month. Now it's kind of tricky, because when you click and drag, you don't really know, like where it's gonna land until you start dragging. And the trick here is Don't let go of your mouse once you let go of your mouse or you pick your pen up from your talent, Um, the selection sets and then you can't work with it the same way, So to de select it, you're gonna press command or control D for D. Select or recon to select de Select are here selectee select, but just that's a keyboard shortcut to know. So, um, what you want to dio is click and drag and don't let go of your mouse while you're holding your mouth down. You can also press the space bar. And with the space bar down, you can reposition your selection. So what I'm looking at is tow line up the left edge of this selection because I started dragging from left to right. So what happens is the left. The upper left area is sort of the anchor point. And as I'm dragging, I'm stretching tour from the anchor point. So when I reposition this by holding space bar, I'm going to drag it and I'm gonna line up the anchor, which is the top left. And then I'll let go of the space bar and I'll tuck in the right. And I may have to fine tune its so space bar again. And I'll drag the whole thing down and over, and you just kind of fidget with it until you get it where you want. It's that look right perspective ways. Mm. Maybe that's better. That looks good. Okay, so something like this ish and then I'll just let go. No, I have the selection. So now let's go back to our fish, and we're gonna just select the whole thing. Command or control? A to put a selection around the whole image. We're gonna copy this, commander Control, see, and will return to this image, and we're gonna paste it. But we're not gonna Regular paste, we're gonna special paste. And we're gonna special pieced into this selection in the coffee mug. Poor fish. He likes coffee. All right, so to do that, we're going to go at it, not paste paste special. You thought I was just being cute? No, that's really called pay special, and we're gonna pays into and it just goes right like that into the mug. So what's happening here is a little preview of what we'll talk more about later. What's happening is that we made that selection of a circle we copied and pasted of whole rectangle. But it's only appearing as a circle. It's all here. The whole thing is here. But the circle that we made earlier created this thing in the layers panel called a mask. And the mask is hiding every the rest of that rectangle. So we're only seeing where it appears inside the circle and let me Okay, so we'll talk more about that later. but it's a pretty cool thing. Now, of course, let's add our realism back to this. So we're going to come down to the, um, adjustment layer button and when they click that and we're going to add an inner shadow to this, So instead of whips, not the adjustment layer, we're going to click the effects button. Sorry. Effects button over here. We're gonna add inner shadow, and we can choose the color of our shadow. So I think black would be good. So I'll click this box and just mouths my cursor way over here. And if you mouse here and you drug all the way to the bottom left corner, you'll have black. You'll know it's pure black. When you see zeros here, then we click. OK, I'm going to change the blend mode to multiply. This should all be by default. I was doing some other stuff, so I have to fix my settings. And then here we could adjust again distance and size. So our light source in this image we look where the shadow is from the mug, the light sources up here. So we want the angle to reflect that. So the shadow should mostly be falling in this area. And then I just kind of wanted to match what I see in the image. What's happening? Like the shadow. Like, how soft is it? How big? How intense. All those kinds of things. So maybe something like that click. OK, I'm also going to change this blend mode from normal this layer blend mode. We'll talk more about this too. We need to change that to multiply new overlay. Yeah, um, and then we can adjust the shadow. So whenever you making it a layer effects and you need to change it, you just double click it, and it brings you right back here. And I went way overboard with that. Lower that down. And this blend mode I think that I actually wanted was hard light. There we go. And maybe we'll add a color overlay two. So from that same effects panel, I'll choose color overlay. This is all bonus. The lesson here was the selection, but, um, we're gonna add a little bonus of color overlay. So we click up here and choose a color. In this case, I'm gonna sample the color right from the image, so I'm gonna I select here and click the swatch? And then if I mouse over my cursor, turns into an eyedropper and Aiken, sample this brown right from the image and click. OK, see it loads right here. I'll click. OK, and I can adjust the blend mode. Mm, maybe multiply. We'll talk more about blend modes two and lower the capacity. There we go. Click. OK, And today you can have a well rounded adventure that might include a finish in your coffee mug. Oh, golly, silliness. OK, and here's another one. So here's a giraffe and we've already got the text here and everything. That's nice. Let's just see from a design perspective, we want to add a color block behind the text just to add some color. Add increased the readability because it's hard to read the white on some of that background. So I'm just gonna go grab the rectangular marquis, and I'm going to create a new blank layer. So at the bottom of the layers panel, this little button right here makes new blank layers. It looks like a sticky note pad, so click the sticky note. You get a new blank layer, and then I'm going to just click and drag to make a rectangular marquee like this, and I'll fill it with the color So we'll go to the swatches and I don't know yellow. We'll see. So I'll pick this color by clicking on it. And then to fill this. You can do with the longhand way, which is edit Phil, and then you choose. Fill it with what? For contents. We choose foreground color because that's a color I just selected right over here and hit. OK, so now it fills it in. We could keep it solid, actually, kind of like it solid. We'll explore that in a minute. I'm going to get rid of my marching ants by pressing commander controlled D to get rid of those ants. But wouldn't it be nice if the giraffes face came in front of this color block? So let's quickly briefly make a mask for this layer. So you had asked, How would we have like in that boat picture? How would we show some of it in color? Some of it not. This is a different, um, effect, but the same procedure. So basically, if I want the giraffe to be in front of this color block. I need to hide part of the color block or select the whole giraffe and copy him in front of it. But that's not necessary. So what I'm going to Dio is temporarily hide the color block by turning off the eyeball and then I'll target the background layer and we'll talk more about layers and targeting and all of that. But you have to select the layer that you want to work with. So I want to select the giraffe, sort of. So I'm gonna click this layer. I'm gonna go get that quick selection brush that we used earlier when we selected the Tiger and I'll make it a little bigger with the right bracket key, and I'll just come in here and do I don't even need the whole giraffe. I just need the part that I wanna bring in front of the block. Then I'll click back on the color black layer, turn the visibility back on, and now I'm gonna mask it, meaning I'm gonna hide the color block from the area that's on top of the giraffe. To do that, I've got the selection already made. It's kind of like a stencil. Now I just need the paint, so I'm gonna click the little button right here. The bottom of the layers panel. It's a rectangle with a circle inside. I had a student once say, Oh, you mean the camera button? It does look like good camera, So find the camera button and click it. Oops, never mind to find the camera button and all. Tor option. Click it. There you go. See, we all make mistakes. Alter option. Click it, and what that does is it tells Photoshopped to hide that layer in this case, the color block. Hide it from the selected area. We'll explore this a little more another way later, but right now that's what a mask does. So just like if you are a bank robber and you wear a mask, it's to hide your face. Or maybe Halloween is a better example. If your Halloween trick or treater you hide your face with a mask, a mask can also hide parts of a layer. Whether it's a color layer like this or an adjustment layer like the black and white convergent, which is the tool to use, is the 4th 1 right. The one you draw the well. I use this tool right here to select the draft. Okay. To draw the color block, I used the rectangular marquis. Oh, yeah? And how is the name of the brush? The 4th 1? This one is the quick selection tool. So yeah, right here. So they both the quick selection tool and the magic wand tool. They both work by reading the image and choosing similar colors or tones. And it's looking for contrast. Essentially. Okay, so and then, you know, if we want to play with this color block a little more, we could adjust the blend mode and get a different effect. So there's all kinds of things you can dio. And this was just with the rectangular marquee, which a lot of people right off and say when we do ever use that. And my answer is all the time, use it all the time.