Lessons
Lesson Info
Class Introduction
So we're gonna have fun with selections in Photoshop. I'm Colin Smith, as Jim said, from Photoshop Cafe. I'm a photographer, designer, digital artist, creator, I just love it all, anything to do with creativity, and Photoshop happens to be my drug of choice. So today we're gonna be talking about selections, and selections is huge, because really, you can't do much in Photoshop without selections. And selections are not just for cutting out things, although that's what we commonly use them for. But what a selection does is when you create a selection and you get those little marching ants, that's actually their official name, scientific. So the marching ants go around an area, and that means we can do things like filtering or brushing or different things, we can constrain those adjustments to those areas of those selections. So we can use selections in that way, and in fact, back when I first started Photoshop, and I'm gonna show a little bit of my age now. Of course I was three years o...
ld when I started. But I started on a version of Photoshop which didn't have layers. Layers came in version three. And so selections and masks is how we did absolutely everything, channels, actually, and selections, is how we did everything before layers came along. Now layers make things a lot easier. And of course we're gonna be doing selections to do that. So I've got a bunch of things I'm gonna be showing you guys with selections, you know, there's manual ways and there's automatic ways. Some of them are gonna get you really, really precise results, and some of them are gonna be a little looser and quicker. And depending on what you're doing, you're gonna decide how accurate you wanna be. You can get in and do pixel-perfect masking and selections, but that's not always necessary, because really, for me, I do this for a living, this is a job, I'm a commercial artist, and I get paid, you know, I get paid getting the job done, not by sitting around and spending days and days and days getting perfect selections. So for example, if you're gonna be delivering something at screen resolution, you don't need to go into the Nth detail, 'cause people are not gonna see it. You know, for things like multimedia, web, things like that. Now, back in my day, when I first started, there was print, and pretty much that's all that anyone did was print. And print is, you know, you could do a magazine cover, you could do a billboard, and people are gonna see those things, particularly a big poster or something like that, book covers, magazine work. People are gonna see right down to the pixel level, so in those cases, we want to go with the very, very precise selections, it's gonna look really good. So just think about, okay, what am I gonna be doing, and how much time should I spend on it? And the idea is to get it done good enough that people are happy with it, but you don't spend weeks on every project, 'cause if you do that, you can't make a living. All right, so I'm gonna show a number of techniques. Some of them are gonna be very, very quick, and then some of them are gonna be using different things. So what I want you to learn today is not just the tools that are in Photoshop. So this is also gonna be, you know, for beginners all the way through to people that maybe are more advanced, gonna have a lot of tips and tricks for you guys in there. But one of the things I want you to be able to do by the end of this class is to be able to look at a photograph and analyze and decide which is the best approach, 'cause I'm gonna give you at least half a dozen approaches today. And you wanna be able to look at a photo and say, okay, what is gonna be the best way to get started making this selection?
Ratings and Reviews
JUAN SOL
Thanks, Colin, for this great course. It's always interesting to get better knowledge about selections, specially for dummys like me!
Gary Hook
Student Work
Related Classes
Adobe Photoshop