Lessons

Lesson Info

Making Selections in Adobe Photoshop

Now let's transition to working in Photoshop and let's learn how to make selections. If you're not familiar with them, a selection is how you isolate an area of your picture. So that's the only area you can change. So if you want to just change the color of somebody's hair and not affect the rest of the image, you're gonna need a selection. Another word for selection is also a mask and the two can be somewhat interchangeably used. So later on, we'll have a session called advanced masking and that would be related to what we're gonna cover here, just the more advanced version of it. So let's dive in and take a look at what it takes to isolate an area in Photoshop. So that's the only thing you're gonna change. If I don't have a selection active and I come up here and let's say, make an adjustment. Uh In this case, I'll go to adjust, I go to brightness and contrast and I'll just randomly move this around to show you it would affect the entire image. If on the other hand, I go to the filte...

r menu and I choose to apply filter, I'm gonna come in here and try find edges again, it'll apply to the entire image. And the same is true. If I use the paintbrush tool, I can paint anywhere and retouching tools pretty much anything you do can affect the entire image. But then if I want to only work on an isolated area, let's say I only want to work on this bus. Well, then I'm gonna need a selection and up here we have a select menu and in there are some choices that can make selections very easy. Here. I'm gonna tell it to just select the subject of the photograph and we'll see if it agrees. Yeah, it did. OK. Here. So now with that selection active, if I come over here and make a adjustment again, brightness and contrast in this case, but uh whatever adjustment it is I use is only gonna affect the area that's selected and not the rest of the image. I'll click. OK. Uh The same would be true with applying filters. I'll just apply that same filter again and the same would be true if I used any tool like here, the paintbrush tool, even though I'm attempting to paint across a wide area of the image, it won't let me these little edges here. Uh We sometimes call them marching ants because they're kind of moving around the edge there. They look kind of like tiny little ants. Uh They indicate where the selection ends and it's not always an accurate edge though, because a selection can fade out, you can have a soft edge where it gradually fades out. And if so, this little dotted line known as the marching ants uh will show up where it's halfway through the fade out. And so doesn't always precisely tell you where the edge is. And so sometimes you'll find, you can paint a bit beyond it because of that. I'm gonna choose undo quite a few times here to get back to the original image here. And let's take a look at the options we have for creating selections. First, we have automated choices in the select menu here. I can tell it to select the sky in the photograph and that's all it takes. And suddenly the sky is selected, but you should be critical of any automated selection tool because it doesn't always do a perfect job. If you look in this case over on the right side and you zoom up. Do you notice that it selected the highlights here up here in the same over here. It also had this selection extend over here into the top edge of this bus. And over here there might have been an area that it shouldn't have. But overall, it did most of the work that I would need. I do see a little bit extending over here where it's not truly the sky but something like that where you can go to the select menu and choose subject or sky. I can save a huge amount of time and then we just might need to tweak the end, resolve to fix those little areas where it messed up. So going to the select menu and choosing subject or sky, those are two automated ways. There's a tool though over here in the tools panel that can also do something similar. It's the one right here. If you click and hold down on it, you'll see that there's more than one tool in that slot. And that is true of any tool that has this tiny little triangle in the corner of its icon. That means there's more than one tool hiding in that slot and you have to click and hold down to see all of them. And so if you don't see this tool in this slot, you might have one of these others chosen and you'd have to click and hold down on it to get to this one. This tool is known as the object selection tool and it's really powerful. Uh If you look up here in the options bar, there's a check box in there called object finder. And if that's turned on, then when you first choose the tool, you might find this little wheel rotating. Let's see if it'll rotate if I click on it because that forces it to update. But what that does is it analyzes your picture and tries to figure out which objects are in here and then there's an icon to the right of it. And if that icon is turned on, you're gonna see pink outlines around where it thought it found objects and you can just hover over one of those areas and click to select it. But you don't need to have that little icon on. I usually have it turned off. But if object finder is turned on, then if I hover over my image, I'm not clicking. It shows me that if I click here, it will select the area that is bounded with pink. If I hover down here, you can see that it found the building. If I go down here, you can see it, found the ground and it found my bus. By the way, I own that bus, I used to live in it full time. If I click there, it will just select that object. And if I move instead and click here, it will then deselect unselected the area that was previously selected and then select this notice. When it selected the building, it did not include the clock and it did not include some areas over here on the right side that it probably should have. But if I wanted it to select only this area where the headlights are like that unit, that's there. This tool just didn't think that was a separate object. So what you can do as an alternative is turn off this check box called object finder when that's turned off and you hover over your image, you will no longer see those pink uh overlays. And instead what you need to do now is click and drag to tell it what you would want selected. So I want that headlight bucket that is here selected. So I'm gonna click right about here and I'll drag to there, I'll let go. And it looked at what was inside that shape and it found this area. If on the other hand, I wanted this window, I can click maybe about here drag to about there, let go and see if it found the window within there. But I don't really like the default setting of this. The default setting makes it. So when I click and drag it makes a rectangle, I would rather draw a free form shape. And to do that, I come up here into the options bar and I change the mode from rectangle to lasso. And now I can draw around free form shapes and therefore I could draw around just this mirror that's here. And I don't have to use a rectangle which might have caused it to select the entire window when I wanted only the chrome mirror area. Well, the problem with this is if now I go around that bucket where the uh headlights are, it will unselected the area above. Well, if you want to add to it, then in the upper left, there are some icons over here. And if you hover over them, you'll usually get a tool tip that tells you what they do. So if I hover here and just pause, it means make a brand new selection. The next time I click, if I go here, it means add to the selection we already have. Whereas this would subtract from it and this would intersect it, meaning only where one selection overlaps the other, where they're both would overlap would be in there. So I might click on that icon if I wanted, not just this little bucket area selected, but I also wanted the chrome mirrors that are here and I wanted them both or I wanted the chrome of the middle of the tire. That's what we can use this for. Uh Or if I'm on that icon on the far left, to be honest, I never switch to these other ones and that's because there are keyboard shortcuts that can be used and they're standard in Photoshop for any selection tool. And therefore once you get used to them, it's just a pain to move your mouse up here all the time. And so here's what they are. If you want to add to a selection, hold down the shift key. And you'll see with my mouse moving around here. If I hold sh shift, you'll see a little plus sign in the middle of that. So that means I can now just draw around here and add that even though up here, I hadn't clicked on these icons. In fact, if you look at the icons, when I hold shift, you'll see it change to that second one just temporarily for as long as I hold shift. If on the other hand, you want to take away from a selection, for instance, down here, where I got the middle of the, the wheel that's here, it got some of the tire and I don't want it to. Well, then you can take away by holding down option. And when I hold down option, which is all in windows, you see a minus sign within my mouse. Well, then I can circle around here what I didn't want and it should remove it just like if I didn't want the middle of the actual headlight itself, I could try to do something like that and have it remove that because maybe I only wanted that white painted area that's surrounding it. So shift adds to and option takes away. Option is alt in windows. So I want to take away this little round mirror. I want to take away the bracket at the top and I can do it. And this tool makes making selections so easy. It's crazy. This is a relatively new tool in Photoshop. We didn't have this for 34 years and therefore you had to have much greater skills before to make selections. So I absolutely love this tool, but sometimes it'll mess up on you. And when it messes up on you, you need to fall back on the old school tools, the tools where you would have to do all this stuff manually, just like grabbing an Exacto knife and cutting something out of a magazine. And so we need to be versed with those particular tools in order to really deal with this. So before we get into that, let me make a selection of an area, let's say it was the sky and let me show you how to get a different view of a selection. Sometimes it's hard to really tell what's select and what's not. Especially when you see these edges moving around that we call the marching hands. So if you go to your tools over here on the left side of your screen and you go just below your foreground and background colors, there's this icon that icon is quick mask mode and it works when you have a selection active. If you click on it, watch what happens. The area that was not selected gets covered up with red and the area that was selected looks normal. And sometimes by turning this on, you can zoom up and see how accurate your selection was, then you can click on it again to go back to the selection you had. So let me go over here and say select uh subject because I think I noticed an issue with that. And it's saying, hey, you're gonna discard the sky. Of course, don't show again. I told you to. All right, now, I'm gonna turn on quick mass mode so we can look at this and look over near the right side and I notice that it messed up right here. I see portions of the building that don't have red stuff on it. Also up here on the roof of the bus, I noticed it skipped part of the roof that's there in a skipped part of the roof that's there as well. Well, when you're in this view, which is known as quick mask mode, then you don't use selection tools to change this. Instead, you use the paintbrush tool. And when you're in the paint brush tool, if you paint with black, you see my foregone color is black right now. That's gonna add to the red stuff and the red indicates what is not selected. So that means I could come in here with my brush, get a smaller brush and I could paint right here and in doing so I'm changing the selection we're gonna end up with. So that that area when I turn off quick mask mode will no longer be selected, then I can use this little arrow here to switch my foreground and background colors. And now I'm painting with white. If you paint with white, then you're gonna remove the red stuff, red indicates what was not selected. So I could come in here and say I don't want these edges up here to be not selected. I might choose undo if I mess up. But let's see here. And I can fine tune this. There's a trick if you ever need to make a straight line when you're using the paint brush, what you can do is instead of trying to paint it perfectly straight, we choose undo, click in one spot and then go somewhere else. Hold, shift and click again. Whenever you hold down, shift and you click, you make a straight line from where you clicked last to where you're clicking. Now, I'll choose undo a few times. So up here, I might need a straight line and so I'll just click right here on the edge, I'll hold shift and maybe I click over here, I'll hold shift, click there, hold shift, click there. And therefore I can get those nice straight lines and not have to pre paint quite as precisely. I might come in here and make sure these little lights. I can't tell if the red is covering up the lights just because they're almost the same color as the quick mask overlay. But I can do that and so I can fine tune this and sometimes what you need to do is like right here. Do you see in between the windshield wiper arm and the bus? There's a gap there and it's not filled with red. So I'm going to switch this over. So I'm painting with black and I'm just gonna paint where that red should be not carrying. If I get over a spray like that, then I'm gonna switch to white and I'm gonna paint over the actual, um, windshield wiper, arm straight lines there and then I'll switch back to painting with black and I'll put the back the outer part in. Sometimes you need to do stuff like that because it would be a pain in the butt to get a brush small enough to just paint through that tiny little area. And so sometimes you need to take some away, put some back and go back and forth. So anyway, I just want to show you how to change those and it can be nice. You just move around here and say, where is it messed up? I don't know what that is. I'm guessing that might be part of the building. If so, let's paint with black. Let's maybe click here. Hold shift, click there. All right. And down here, it missed a spot right there. So paint with white because white removes the red stuff, hold shift there and so on. Now, I need to switch between painting with black and painting with white so often that I hate going over here and hitting that little arrow to switch each time. Watch what happens though to my foreground and background colors when I type the letter XX means exchange those colors. And therefore right now I'm painting with white. I can remove something, then I can hit X and I could paint with black, hit X painting with white, hit X. I'm painting with black again. And if you get used to that, you can be much faster. Uh hit X right there. I forgot a spot. I'm not trying to make this perfect because I'm not trying to do anything to this image like down here, I'm not sure what we should have there. The other thing is quick mask mode is something that I turn on to kind of preview. What does the edge look like? And then I turn it off to get back to the what I call the marching ants view. Well, there's a shortcut for going into quick Mask and for going out of it and all it is is easy to remember if you can remember what that feature is called and that is you just type Q all by itself. Cue for quick mask, type it a second time to get out of it. So maybe what I'd like to do is not include the shadow that is here. So I'm gonna paint with black. I'll kind of paint like this where I'm following the edge of that tire edge. Let's paint out there. All right. Then I'd have to decide. Maybe I click here. I hold shift to get in there and I'm just gonna guess where the edge of that tire was. I'll hit X to exchange my foreground background colors. X again, I'm just switching between painting with black and painting with white and I could fine tune that. It will take you a little while to get used to that. But it's how you become very efficient with fixing selections. So the selection you may initially created was done with some automated tool. You went up here in a selected subject or sky or you went to that tool and you circled around what you wanted. But when you did it messed up and when it did you typed Q to see this overlay because it's usually easier to see if it messed up somewhere. I can tell right there. I'm missing a spot. So I'll paint with black right there and then you can hit queue again and turn it off. And when it's off is the only time when you can apply filters or paint or paint where it actually affects your picture uh or make adjustments, that kind of stuff. So anyway, that is a quick way of making selections. And so far modifying the selection. We used quick mask mode, but quick mask mode is not always what you need. So let's work with some other images and learn some of the other basic selection tools on this image. I'm assuming that the object selection tool will allow me to just go and kind of do a crude circle around here and get a coin if I want to see if it's accurate I type Q and I compare the red to the coin and I think that's good enough for what I might use that for. I could hold shift and I could get this coin as well and I can go right in between that gap there and hopefully it'll find what's in there. But let's say I wanna select this coin. It's two different colors and it's partially covered up by one and another. I want just that coin. I'm not sure if this tool will do good enough or not. Let's find out I'm just going to kind of draw this shape and see if you can get it and then I'll type Q and I'll zoom up and say, is it good enough? Um No, right here. It missed a little bit right there. It missed a little bit right there. Here. You know, that kind of stuff. Let's see if there are other ways and it's not that I'm saying the tools I'm about to use are the best tools for this. It could have been an automated tool, but we need to learn the more basic tools because sometimes the automated ones fail and when they fail, sometimes you need to go back to the most basic tool that's been there for 30 years. Let's take a look at them. Here is the rectangular marquee tool. It is designed for selecting rectangles and that's not gonna be helpful in this particular image, but that's what it's designed to do if you click and hold down on it. There's another one called the elliptical marquee tool. And it's designed for selecting circles and ellipses or ovals, you could call it. But it's kind of weird how it works because let's say I wanna select this, this coin. That's right here. So I go to the edge of the coin, I click on the edge of the coin and I drag to the other edge of the coin and the selection is nowhere near the size I need. And it's kind of weird look at where my mouse is right now compared to the shape I'm getting doesn't really make sense. Well, it does make sense if you know how the tool works. This tool is thinking about what is known as the bounding box of this object. The bounding box would be the smallest rectangle that could contain that object. Imagine you had a straight rectangle, not one on an angle. And if so if you wanted to ship this to somebody and fit it inside of a rectangular box, that rectangular box would hit the top edge of the coin and it would hit the left edge of the coin in its corner would be right up here, wouldn't it? If it was the smallest blocks that could contain that coin? Well, that's where you actually need to click, then drag to where the opposite corner of the same box would be. Well, if I had a cardboard box. I put that in the edge would go out to here and it would come down to about there and then if I adjust that, I can try to get that just right. But it's gonna be hard to get that just right. So there's a trick and what it is is you guess at where that bounding box would be that cardboard box that it would contain. That's where you first click is where the corner would be. You drag to where the opposite corner would be and you'll be off a little bit you see on the left side. So here's the trick. Do not let go of the mouse, keep it held down until that selection perfectly matches the shape you're going for. But right now, I can only control the right side and the bottom when I move, move this. So here's the trick, hold the space bar. When you hold the space bar, you can move this whole thing. So now move it until the top edge lines up and move it until the left edge lines up because that was controlled by where you first clicked and you weren't quite accurate there. But if I'm holding the space bar, I can adjust it until those two areas, the top and the left line up, then let go of the space bar, but keep your mouse held down. And now it's as if you originally clicked in a different area to start this and now get the right side and get the bottom side to line up and we can make a selection that's perfect for that particular object. And that will probably be a much better selection than what that automated tool would use. Because that automated tool will see these little undulations in this background and probably go around those a little bit. So I can type letter Q and see how perfect of a selection is that. And you see it's really smooth all the way around. And if I were to turn that off and replace that with that other tool that I used earlier, the object selection tool, we'll see if it looks better or not. I'm guessing mine's gonna be more accurate if I type Q. Hm. Come up here. Do you see right there? That doesn't quite look right. But overall it's pretty good. I think it brought it in maybe a little too much up here. But the main thing is how much control did I have? Not a lot. So turn off quick mask. So what was the trick I was in this tool? And I clicked. You don't even have to be accurate where you click up here. Just go somewhere close, click and drag and then don't let go your mouse space bar, get the top set up just right, then get the left and after you get the left, just confirm the top didn't mess up up. Let go of the space bar. Now get the right and get the bottom just where you want it. If you need to move it again, just press space bar. But space bar only works up until the moment you let go of the mouse and then space bar wouldn't do anything after that. All right. So there I have that selected. Now, what about selecting this coin here? Well, for that, we need to remember some keyboard shortcuts for adding and taking away from selections. So I want to add this coin just to show you the keyboard shortcut for adding. So if I were to just come up here and click and let go, it would replace the selection that I already made and I don't want that to happen. So I'm gonna choose undo command Z and I'm gonna hold down the shift. Key shift means add. Then I'm gonna think of where would that bounding box be? I'll click here and start to drag the moment you click. You can let go of shift because it's only paying attention at the exact moment. You click your mouse. It's saying, hey, if you click with nothing held down, you wanted to replace what was there. And if you have something held down, you probably wanted to add. So now I can press space bar at the top and the left side lined up and then let go space park at the right and the bottom lined up. All right. Now I got two coins. But then what if I want to take away from a selection? Well, that's where this might come in. What I'm gonna do is add this coin as if I could see the whole thing. So this time, instead of starting the upper left, I might start in the lower, right, just because it's easier to tell where the bounding box would be. So I'm gonna click about here before I click. I'm gonna hold shift because I don't want to get rid of the selection that's already here. I want to add to it. So I hold shift and I click right there. I start to drag and I can let go of shift at any time after I start dragging. And I'm gonna bring that out until this is approximately the right size. I can tell I'm way off though. So I press space bar now where I originally clicked was defining the, the right and the bottom edge. So those are the sides this time I'm getting right the right side and then the bottom. OK. Then I let go space bar. Now I'm gonna get the top. I can't see the right side, but I can see if I'm kind off. Um, so I get the top and I guesstimate, try to get that curvature just right. All right. So I got that. But now I need to remove this coin. Huh? Well, I'll think about the bounding box and I'll pick one of the corners of the bounding box, whichever one I feel like I'm gonna go for the lower left of the bounding box, which would be about here. But before I click, I need to tell it, do I wanna add if so I hold shift or do I want to take away? And if I want to take away you hold option, I have option held down right now. I see a minus and I'm going to click right here. I'm going to drag to up here where the opposite edge would be. I can let go of that option key at any time after clicking and I can tell I was off. So space bar, space bar allows me to move this. So I'm gonna get the bottom edge in this case to line up and the left edge to line up in this case. And that's because that's what I was defining when I first clicked because I started in that lower left corner of the bounding box. Now I'm gonna get the top and the right. But since I had option held down at the moment, I first clicked. Option means take away. So when I let go, this part here that I am currently got my selection on top of will no longer be selected there. Now, I have that, that's not an easy selection to make unless you know, these little tricks of, you know, space bars and other things like that. If you want to see how accurate it is. Remember, you can type the letter QQ means quick mask. If you hate keyboard shortcuts, quick mask is this icon that is right below your foreground and background colors, you can just click on it and it does. The exact same thing is typing Q. All right. Let's close up that image and let's work on this one in this image. What I would like to do is to make a selection of the brown wood elements here. I don't want the glass of the door. I don't want the lock on the door, but I want everything else. And let's see how using the tools we've talked about thus far, we might be able to do that. So I could either start with the circle or start with the rectangle of the door. Uh It's a personal choice since I have this tool already selected. I might as well start with that. I'm gonna think about what would be the bounding box of this circular area. Any one of the four corners of a cardboard box that would contain that shape. I'm gonna go for the upper left. So here's the top edge, there's the left edge. So where would the corner be? And it'd be out here somewhere. I'm gonna click and I'm gonna drag like this until I get approximately the right width and height. It's not lining up. I can see it on the left side. So that's when I press space bar and I'm not letting go of my mouse, I'm gonna also make sure the top seems to be lined up. I think that's pretty good. I'll let go space bar now I can get the right side in the bottom. Mm I think I need to move left the tiniest bit so space bar move it left. Let go of space bar. Ok. I'm thinking that's pretty good. Now I want to add the door like that bottom part. So what I'm gonna do is come in here and choose my rectangular marquee tool. That's the one that makes rectangles. I'm gonna come down and I'll go to where I think the edge of a rectangle is, which might be about here before I click. I'm gonna hold down, shift, shift means add and I'll click and I'll do something like this and it should add that shape. So now we have it, it's not precise down here at the bottom. We'll have to fix that in a minute, but I don't want the glass part of the door. So that's when I hold down. The option key option. Alton Windows means take away, I go right to the corner of the glass click and I can let go of option the moment I click. It doesn't matter after that point. And I'm gonna say what part don't I want, I'll get that. I also don't want the lock part of the door. So for that I need this and I might zoom up on the image command plus, zooms up, control plus and windows. I accidentally clicked. I didn't mean to. So I'm gonna type command Z to undo that. And now let's try to do this. I need to hold down the option key. That means take away go to where the bounty box would be click. And then after that, I can let go of option and I'm off. So I do space bar to get the right side and the bottom approximately right and then let go of space bar, get those other two sides. And I can tell up here I wasn't accurate because I wasn't zoomed up. But I'm gonna say it's good enough because for what we're learning, I simply should have zoomed up when I was clicking and dragging there. Then let's go down here at the bottom and I see that I got some of this stone and I don't want it. Well, that's when we're gonna switch to a tool we haven't used yet. We've used the rectangular and the elliptical. But then right here we have the lasso, the lasso allows us to draw freeform shapes, any shape you want. And so down here, I want to take away and I'm gonna hold down the key that takes away, which is option. I see a little minus sign. I'm gonna click out here somewhere. It doesn't matter where. And I'm just gonna draw a shape coming in here and going across like that and I'll try to keep that on there, go out about like that come back to where I started let up. So I just took away that part at the bottom. I also see that over here at the right, this is not exact. So I hold down the key that takes away, which is option and Ira around that little edge there, loop around this way and it takes away same thing on the opposite side, holding out option going like this to take away right here. I think I missed the little part, hold option. Take away when you're using this tool though. Very frequently, it is useful if you can make straight lines because drawing across the bottom part of the door, I was only so accurate. I wish it was a perfectly straight line. So for now I hold shift and I'll just add that area back as if I never did it. And let me show you a trick about using the lasso tool for. Now, let's ignore the selection we have. I can choose undo enough times to get back to it in a few minutes. So I'm just gonna click when you use the lasso. Usually you make a free form shape like this. And if you don't end up where you started, it will just draw a straight line to end this. So when I let go, you see the straight line, but sometimes they want a straight line in the middle of something. And so here's how you can do that with the lasso. If you click and you start dragging like this and you want a straight line. Here's what you need to do on your keyboard. Hold down the option key. I have it held down right now. That's Alton Windows. If you have that held down and you keep it held down, then if you let go of your mouse, it doesn't finish the selection. Instead, you can click and click and click and make as many straight line segments as you want. If you want to finish and not make straight again, just click and keep the mouse held down and you'll be making squiggles. And it's only the moment you let go of the mouse that if you hold down option, you get straight lines. If you don't hold down option, then the moment you let go of the mouse, it finishes the selection. So let me choose undo a few times. All I'm doing is typing command Z to get back multiple steps. I want to take away from this area down here. So I hold down the key that takes away, which is option. I start to draw. I get over here and I need a straight line. So I get to right there. I hold down the option key. I keep it held down and I let go of my mouse. Then I click where I want that line to start. And I might because I don't know if this is perfectly straight. I might create a few segments. Click, click, click, maybe click there, maybe come over there and click. I'm gonna come out this way because I want to remove this portion. I go over there and to finish it off, I let go of both the mouse and the option key. So option can do two different things. And it depends on when you hold it down. If you hold it down before you click the mouse, it means take away after you click the mouse, it means something different. So you can let go of the option key and press it again. And that's when you're using the lasso tool and you wanna make straight lines. It takes practice though. And so I could use that up here. I would like to fix this because my selection was not accurate here. So what I'm gonna do is hold shift, which means add, I'll click and then I can let go shift. Then I'll inch over here to that edge of the door. I want a straight line. That's when you hold option. And as long as you keep option held down, you can let go of your mouse. And I don't know if this is perfectly straight all the way across. So I might go a certain distance. Click, go a little more click, go a little more because if it's an old door, it might not be perfectly straight or I go all the way up. If I think it's perfectly straight, then I just come up here and say where that now I'm gonna actually go towards the left like this, go down like this over like this. I'm just trying to get back to where I started. So the shape I just drew, which is kind of a big l shape that I just added all that stuff there. I did and I think my right side and the top wasn't too bad. Now, I could type the letter Q for a quick mask and I could check my work. I know I wasn't perfectly accurate on the big circle part. I should have just been zoomed in. And if so I could have been more accurate, but you can see how you can combine together these crude tools that we have to create more sophisticated and complex uh selections and you can type Q for quick mass to check your work. So let's close that and let's look at a few other tools. Well, you remember we had the object selection tool. So if I want something like this, I can just circle around it like this and see if it'll cling to it and look at that. It even kept that middle out of there. But was it truly precise zoom up on? It depends what you wanted to do to the image but do you see where it forgot part of the red. Well, you can use the exact same tool you just used and hold shift and just say, hey, include that and oftentimes it will, it will add what you told it to. So now I would like these letters along with those. So I hold shift to add and I go around the entirety of those letters and wow, it noticed those interior portions and it did a pretty darn good job. That looks the amount of time that saves is crazy. I'll hold shift and I'll go around all these and I'm just trying to see if it'll mess up so I can fix it. Uh It forgot a spot right there. So if that's a spot that shouldn't have been selected, I hold down the key that takes away option and I just say take that away right here. I forgot that. So I will there right here and also forgot that fine taking, I'm just holding down the option key to mean take away and I can guide it and get it to change things one more. Hold shift just trying to get your practice with doing this option. Takes away. So I go in here. Do I need to do it? Precisely. No, you can probably do about like that and right there, I just forgot that little guy. All right. Uh I didn't do this side, so we'll see if that might be good enough. The guy in here, I'm holding option just so, you know, to take away, man, I wish I had this tool 20 years ago. I could have saved years of work. Uh All right, one more over here shift to try to get the whole guy. Uh Just look around, it looks pretty darn good. So we just selected all those letters. Uh Well, now what I could do is I could copy those letters and I could paste them on top of a different photograph so that the only part of this I would have is the letters. So here I can choose copy. I don't know that I have a picture. I want to put them in. Um I don't know, I want to put them here. So I choose paste and suddenly we have those letters. Uh So that's an example of when you might wanna make a complex selection, but I'll choose undo and get rid of that image and we already did that. So I can, well, actually, let's see, do I have another version of this? Because I thought I had that selection. I think I might have two versions of the same picture. Yep, I have two versions of the same picture uh open. That was kind of odd. But now let's say what I want instead of the red letters, what I would like instead is the yellow banner that's there minus the red. So how can I do that right now? The selection is around the red stuff. Well, if I go to the select menu, um there's a choice in there that is called inverse inverse means give me the opposite of what I currently have. So if the red letters are selected, then when I choose inverse, we now have everything except for the red letters. So now this area out here, if I hit letter Q, the red shows you what's not selected and you can see the red letters are not selected. All right. But I want the banner. How could I do that? Well, I could tell it to take away and try to take away some of the red, but there is something else we could do. What is it? Well, if you hold shift, you add to a selection. If you hold option, you take away from a selection, what do you think happens if you hold them both? Well, if you hold them both, that's shift and option on windows, that would be shift and alt look at my mouse. Do you see an X in it? Well, what that does is watch, I'm gonna click and I'm gonna circle around the entire banner. I didn't mean to get that little white part. Hopefully, it ignores it. And if you have both keys held down, it means try to select whatever is inside this shape I drew. But after you do give me only the part that was already selected that overlaps that. So right now, we have everything in this image selected except for the red letters. So now let's see what happens if I did that. Ah, we now have just the yellow banner. So if I hit Q, it's gonna cover it with red, everything that's not selected, we have just the yellow banner. That's pretty crazy. That's known as intersecting a selection and it's not something you're going to use every day, but it is very useful depending on what it is you need to do. Uh I wanna add the white around here. So I'm gonna add hold shift and I'm just gonna go around this whole thing. OK? But I don't want the inside, so I'll hold on the key that takes away option and I'll just kind of draw like this and you can so darn lazy these days with these tools, you have no idea how long it would take to do that before this tool was added. Then you double check your work and you do that with quick mask mode. So I type the letter Q and I compare this red overlay to what I was envisioning. And if there's some area that isn't quite right. Uh I can paint with black, uh just go here to my paint brush paint with black, just make sure your brush doesn't have a soft edge. Mine's got a, a hard edge and you can go through right there. It's, it's messed up right in here. So I can click, remember straight lines to shift clicking. I know there's a lot through remember in there, but I'm trying to get it. So you get practice using these tools because the automated tools are amazing right there. I can see that red isn't all the way covered. So I will paint with black, black always adds to the red stuff. White always takes away when you're a quick mask and let's say that's good enough. So I turn off quick mask with QE and now I could come up here and copy that and use it in a different picture. I don't have a great picture for it. In fact, I have two of these. Let me close that second one. Uh OK, we'll paste it in here. I'm guessing it might be too big of a picture because I think this is lower resolution but, but you can see we have it here. Yeah, maybe I wanted to go around the coffee mug. Uh I don't know, I didn't have a good use for that. I just wanted to um show you how to make selections like that if you make a complex selection like this and you might need to leave your image and come back later and you don't want to lose the selection. Like if you turned off your computer and turn it back on again, you can go to the select menu and there's a choice called save selection and you can just give it a name, I'll call mine banner. And then if you want to get rid of the selection at any time, not the saved one, but the one that's active. Right now, you can go to the select menu and choose deselect. And uh then you could save this image and open it tomorrow. And if you want the selection back, you come up here to the select menu and choose load selection and right here, it will give you the names of any saved selections you've made and you can save as many as you want. So mine was called banner and I can get it back. Sometimes having the edges of your selection like this active is very distracting. Maybe I want to do some painting or anything to this image and I just find it to be distracting. Well, if you go up to the view menu, there's a choice here just called extras and you can toggle it on or off and usually do it by typing this command H which means hide. And or if you hate keyboard shortcuts, you can manually choose it, but it would hide the edges. The very first time you type it on a Macintosh, it will ask you this question. And that's because the mac operating system uses command H to hide whatever program you're currently in. So you can go switch to another program and I rarely use command H to hide an app. And so I choose this choice. And this means ignore that the operating system would usually use command H and instead allow it to hide those extras instead. So I choose this. Um So command H means don't show the marching ants on the edge but have the area. So it's still selected. So therefore, if I grab the paintbrush tool right now and I attempt to paint, you'll see that the selection is active because I can only paint where it's active. It's just we can't see it if I want to see it, I type command H and that will unhide it. OK. So command H is something I use all the time. There are a few other tools that can be useful. Let's get rid of the selection. And let's say I'm gonna use the marquee tool which makes rectangles to select around this. And let's see, how could I have selected this back before this tool was active or was available? Well, we do have the quick selection tool and we also have the magic wand tool. Magic wand tool has been in Photoshop since the beginning, I think uh in the quick selection tool is a little more intelligent. So how do they work? What can we do with them? Well, I guess I didn't need the selection. So I'm going to deselect right now. I'm in the quick selection tool. What it does is it gives you a brush which you can change the size of the same way you change the size of a paintbrush, which means you can either click up here at the top and change the size or you can use keyboard truck cuts, which would be the square bracket keys. And with the quick selection tool, what you can do is you get this brush so it is smaller than the object you want to select. Therefore, you won't get any overspray on the surrounding areas and you click the mouse and it instantly tries to spread out to include areas. Looks similar to this. If it doesn't get enough areas, you can start to paint like this and just try to make it. So you don't get any overspray on anything you don't want. So I can come down here and I just touched that yellow part and therefore it started to select it. So let me choose undo and try that again. I'll click here. I can let go though and do this in multiple strokes. So therefore, I don't even have to hold shift. The default up here in the upper left is the one with the plus sign because it thinks I want to add. So I'll click here and I can just click and let go if I want click and let go like that. But it's really designed so you can look and paint across something. If there's something you don't want, then just as with any selection tool, you hold down the option key, all the windows. My brush now has a minus sign on it. I want to remove this part. So I click and I just make sure I don't get any overspray on things that I didn't want to take away. So right here, this brush is too big because I'm touching the red stuff too. So I need a smaller brush there. I hold on option to take away and I click. I come over here, hold on option and click. And if it ever doesn't give me enough, I can click and drag to define a bigger area or just let go and click again, I'd have to use smaller brushes for these areas. But I think you get the idea of this is looking at what's underneath my brush in attempting to spread out and get things similar to it and it stops where it thinks there's a great enough difference in brightness in color or in texture. And so it thought there was a great enough difference there. There wasn't really. So I'll click here and I'll just drag up here until it gets all that. I'll let go. I'll click over here, I'll click there there. But I wanna make sure I don't get over a spray on the background. If this overlap the background a little bit, it will start selecting portions of that background. Then I hold on option to take away and I get this little part. 00, I didn't want to take away. So I zoom up, see what's going on option. Well, now it does it, but it, if it doesn't do it, well, like there's a tiny spot there, it missed, I could switch to the lasso tool and I could do it there or I could switch to Quick mask and paint. You can combine any selection tools together. So that's another tool. Before we had that tool, we had a much cruder cruder tool called the magic Wand. A lot of people have nicknamed it the tragic wand because of how basic it is. Oops, I didn't mean to type whatever I did. OK. Let's go here and let's say I want to take away these areas here. What the magic wand does is it selects things um based on how different is the surrounding area from what you click on. So I want to take away right here. So I hold option with any tool you hold option and I'm gonna click and then it just looked at the brightness and the color of the area that I clicked on. Just the single pixel that I clicked on. And up here is a setting called tolerance. And if what I clicked on it spread out to include things that were 32 shades brighter and 32 shades darker in it. That's what it selected. So as long as this red area out here is at least 32 shades brighter or darker, then I could click here and it should be able to find that edge and I can click. Not very often I use the magic wand tool these days, but on occasion, it can be a lifesaver when another more sophisticated tool fails you and you could always adjust the tolerance to say, make it more um picky by lowering the number or make it select a wider range by increasing it. I'm gonna do something that has to do with layers. I'm not gonna describe what I'm doing. All I'm gonna tell you is I just did something uh to this image. And what it is is somehow I got some of these pieces on a separate layer. If you look in my layers panel, you'll see the original picture underneath. And now there's a new layer on top when you use selection tools and you have layers, then you need to look up here in the options bar because there's a choice up here called sample all layers. And if that's turned off, then whenever you use this tool, it's gonna only look at the layer that is currently active and it will absolutely completely ignore the rest of the image. It will be as if the layer that's below simply does not exist. It'll be as if I turn off its eyeball. So this is all the tool can see even though I likely have that eyeball turned on, so I can see this other stuff. So what that means is if I attempt to select this thing over here and it's not on the layer I'm currently working on, it's just not gonna see it. It only saw the edge of this because when sample all layers is turned off, it means look only at the active layer. If you turn on sample all layers, then you can ignore what's in your layers panel, it's gonna look at whatever this picture looks like regardless of if it's made out of layers or not. And therefore it won't know that this is on a separate layer from this and it will treat them all the same. And therefore I can circle over whatever I want and it will see everything that's in that picture regardless if it's made out of layers or not. But that's an important choice when you get a complex document made out of layers and you start using selection tools and you don't need it for the marquee tool tool or the elliptical because you're totally manually making that selection, same thing with your lasso tool. But once you get down here and you have your object selection tool, your quick selection tool or your magic wand tool, they all inspect the image and try to figure out what's in it and that's where sample all layers is going to matter. Let me throw away that layer though. Let's look at one other one. I'm not gonna get all that deep into this next one, but I just want to let you know that it's there. If you go to the select menu, there are other choices. Um There's one called color range. And if you use color range, this comes up and what it's doing is uh it's waiting for you to click on the image. It wants to know what color do you want to select. So I'd like to select this yellow. So I click in over here. I get a preview. This preview is trying to show the area that would be selected as being white and whatever is not being selected as being black. This is actually a miniature version of the entire picture I'm working on. And if I don't see enough in white, there's an eye dropper over here with a plus sign on it. When that's active, I can click over here and add another color and you notice over here on the right side how it's not all white. So I'm gonna go to that side of the picture and I'm gonna click and it doesn't look like up here was selected if I compare it to this so I can click and I'm gonna click on those areas that it didn't seem to get. And there was one other one over here there, then it can say how much can we deviate from the colors that I've clicked on? And that's what fuzziness is. If I brought fuzziness down, we're not gonna have as good of a selection because it's only gonna look at the areas, the exact areas where I clicked and it's gonna say let's grab things that are really just like those. But as I bring fuzziness up, it says, let's be able to go a little brighter, a little darker, a little bit less yellow, like more, maybe more towards a little hint of orangish or something. And I could bring that up. And what I'd usually do is bring it up until too much of the image shows up and then back off and I'm trying to move it until black surrounds the thing I was trying to select. I'm not gonna be concerned with this part at the bottom because I can always take away from the selection and take that out. But I'll just click. OK? And we'll see the selection we ended up with. Now you see these areas down here. Well, I just grab my lasso tool. I hold on the key that takes away which is option. And I say, hey, I didn't want any of this stuff and therefore I don't care about that, but maybe I cared about what was up here. I don't think this is as good as a selection as the other tools made. But if what you had was somebody's face and they had hints of red in their face. And it wasn't like this where it's this blatant border instead, there was just like rosy cheeks and you wanted to get the rosy cheek with a nice little fade out transition. That tool would likely be much better than the tools we used on this picture uh earlier. So selections, selections is how you isolate an area. Once you have a selection active, any painting or retouching, you do will be limited to that area. Filters and adjustments will also be limited to that area. So in general, whatever it is you're doing, you could only do where it's selected. There are many different selection tools and I'd love to use the automated ones. Select sky select subject. We have that object selection tool. They're amazing, but they're not perfect. And so in the areas where they mess up is when you switch to a more basic tool or you type Q to turn on quick mask mode and you paint with a brush, just know that the hardness on the edge of your brush is important. That's one of the settings on your brush. If you need the selection to slowly fade out, you can use a soft brush. And if you need the selection to be crisp, you want a hard selection or a hard edge brush. And if after you've made a selection with any tool whatsoever, you need the edge of it to be soft. So that when you brighten or darken the image or something, it doesn't have a crisp patch. Instead it fades out. You can go to the select menu and there's a choice called feather. And you type in a number, the higher the number, the softer the edge becomes and you don't see it immediately on the screen. But when you do something in that selection, like you paint or you apply a filter or something else, you notice that the edge instead of abruptly ending it slowly fades out a little bit. But selections are one of the essential tools of working with Photoshop and you will never stop learning about how to make them. Because sometimes you need to select the most complex thing. You have a glass bottle. You have this, I want to remove the background on it. Well, I need a selection so I can delete what's behind it. You can make selections as complex as a seer piece of glass where in the end you could delete the background behind it, but you have to get good. And that's why we have other sessions. We have one called advanced masking where we might cover that kind of thing.