Adobe Photoshop CS6 Selection, Part 2

Hi everyone, Mike Brown here again with you, welcome back to educator.com's Adobe Photoshop CS6 course.0000

In the previous lesson, basic selections one, we took a look at the primary selection tools and those are the Marquee tool; rectangular and elliptical, the Lasso tools; the freehand and polygonal.0007

Quick selection, Magic Wand tool--quick selection looks for edges, Magic Wand areas of color, and I gave you a short look at Quick Mask, which is a method to view your selections (let's just make one so you can see it).0022

View your selections with a semi-transparent overlay being the masked out area, and transparent where it is a selected area, and you can modify these by painting, and in this lesson I'm going to take the previous lesson's basics and we're going to expand it for the tools, put it together and show you how to use multiple tools at one time to make selections.0039

How to save selections, how to paint Quick Mask to adjust a selection, how to paint brand new selections from scratch using Quick Mask, and then we're going to put it all together in two samples and show you how it actually works.0065

Alright, let's get started--the first thing I want to show you; I made up this chart based on our last lesson.0082

This is basic selection shortcuts--now these are all listed in the--if you remember the tools and tools shortcuts lesson, there is a complete list of single letter shortcuts, and Command on a Mac, Control on a PC plus a single letter; two key shortcuts.0091

These are there but I wanted to consolidate these so you can keep them for the basic selections--get used to these, it'll save you a lot of time because you're going to be using selections a lot, and it's real easy when you can move back and forth without having to continually jump into the Toolbox.0110

So, I would suggest stop the video for a moment, take a screenshot of this, print it out just for reference.0128

Now let's just go over it real quick; here's the basic tools.0135

Marquee tools; rectangular Marquee, M, Marquee tools.0138

Lasso tools; all the Lasso tools, L for Lasso tools.0144

Quick selection and Magic Wand--the Magic Wand tool was created before they had the quick selection tool and they used W so that sticks.0149

Quick selection and Magic Wand--the single key is W and you notice here if you click and hold on your Toolbar on a tool, there's the shortcut listed right there in case you lose it.0159

The Pen tool, which we're going to deal with in future lessons--the real powerful selection tool--the letter P for Pen, and Quick Mask down here which is currently active; Q for Quick Mask.0170

Those are your basic tools and the shortcuts.0182

Operations; adding to an existing selection.0185

When you're in any of these three basic selection tools, or any of them underneath including the dropdowns...Shift will temporarily (let me just demonstrate this real quick) we have a selection, notice we have the new icon.0189

You could click here for the add but you can also stay in the tool as it is, hold down the Shift key, and you see the plus sign and it temporarily changes to the add, and then you can just add a piece, or by the way the pieces do not have to be connected, you could add another external piece or more for that matter.0206

To subtract from an existing selection; Option on a Mac, Alt on a PC you'll get the minus sign and you surround what you want to remove, and away it goes.0227

OK, to hide the crawling ants at any time or reveal them; Command on a Mac, Control on a PC plus the letter H--Command+H, they go away, Command+H they come back--that does not de-select, just hides the boundary of the dashed line crawling ants.0238

We're going to de-select that now, the next one de-select the selection--Command on a Mac, Control on a PC plus the letter D, and to select all which selects everything to the boundaries of your file; Command or Control+A, and you have that and under the Select menu there's the select all and de-select right there as well.0257

OK, I'm going to de-select that--Command+D, there they are, so let's move forward and start working on making selections and how we go about thinking about it.0280

Here's a photo right here, I'm going to zoom it up not by Command or Control plus and minus to zoom down, Command or Control spacebar, scrubby zoom until I get it where I want it.0291

Let's even come up a little higher here--I'll use the spacebar for the Hand tool and move over.0305

What we have here, notice the shoreline is pretty indistinct, and the mountains--I'm disturbed by these two, hang on a second we're going to use the Spot Healing brush to get rid of these, those were sensor dirt.0311

Now we're back and I can think again.0328

OK, we want to select along the shoreline which we obviously see is pretty straight (it better be, it's the ocean) until you get right into here--there's a jetty sticking out but it's all straight lines too.0331

We come right on across and back and it continues with a series of straight segments all the way until we get to the hill, and then running up the hill we're going to have to deal with using the freehand tool to select those.0344

Now there's two ways to do this; you could try the quick selection tool or for that matter (oh that should be interesting) let's try the Magic Wand just for fun at a fairly low tolerance--let's just go a tolerance of 9 just as a guess and we'll click.0359

And Shift to add, click more, Shift to add, we'll just keep moving down and see what happens.0379

Now you see when it gets into the land it's all fuzzy because it's similar color so that didn't work really that well.0386

I knew it wouldn't because we had all this kind of muffled color in there so let's go try the quick selection tool which looks for edges, and we'll just drag along and see how good this thing does.0394

It did a reasonable job but it needs some fix up and adjustment over here, but one thing that it does not have, is feather.0406

The edge...let's go to Quick Mask and I'll show you and zoom it up...the edge is pretty harsh...but it's not completely harsh--the quick selection tool actually does what's called anti-alias, and it does smooth the edge just slightly so that doesn't look too bad, but notice where it's missing in a lot of spots.0418

Right here it need to add more, there is subtract, I'm going to do it another way so that you can see a combination of tools.0444

We're going to take the polygonal Lasso tool, and I've pre-set a feather which is the softest of the edge--I set it at two just to smooth the edge, and what we're going to do is we're going to make that straight edged selection using the polygonal tool.0452

So I'm going to zoom up a little so I can see close to my edge, now you realize we're past the boundaries of the image--I'm going to show you a trick as we move along.0470

We're going to start by clicking on the shore and releasing, just moving around with your mouse, track pad or the tablet, same thing, click...now we can do one of two things; I'm floating around, I can hold the spacebar down, got the Hand tool.0481

I can click and drag over, release and I'm back to my active selection tool--it didn't disturb the selection.0498

We'll click again and I'll do that one more time; spacebar, click and drag and go back over.0506

Now see it did make an error--I actually touched something, this is something I'm glad it happened.0512

If you make a small error, don't stop and go back to the beginning, just pick it up and make the error as small as possible (I'll click down here) and I'll just keep moving, no problem, we'll come back and fix it.0518

This is a key time saver in making a selection any time, click, spacebar, move, if you make a small error or even a reasonably large one, don't waste time going back all the way to the beginning, just keep moving, and now I want to show you the other trick.0539

We're still in straight edges and there's more to go...if I go to the edge of the image window, the document window, notice when I push past it, I'm not touching with your mouse you'll just be free roaming and with your finger on the track pad--notice I'm using the track pad now just move the icon past it.0551

It will push that image out to the other side, so you don't even need to use the spacebar tool necessarily.0572

We're going to do that again...hands up, wands down--I'm using the dreaded touchpad, I hate this thing...that's why I have that, I said it before get yourself a Wacom tablet.0584

We're still following the shoreline until it runs out here, it's coming down a little over into here, and I think that's the end of it--yes, so now we're still hands free--let's zoom out a little bit--Command or Control minus.0600

We've got all the way across to this point, so what we're going to do now, is we're going to go (zoom up one time) we're going to go up past the boundary of the image, I've told you we can do this before.0615

I'm going to click outside, and I'm going to do that, let it find its way back just pressing on the left--click outside, click outside, now come over--look for the little zero, click, and I have my selection.0631

When I save the selection or when I apply it, that boundary will snap to the edge, so rather than try to click along an edge which means you might make a mistake and come inward, always click past it--it'll just snap right back, no problem.0643

So let's take Quick Mask and look at what we've got--Command or Control spacebar and zoom, and we're going to zoom up by the scrubby zoom and take a look at our edge--there was our mistake.0658

Now we can either go back and just surround that by going--take the freehand tool; Option--I just lost my selection, if you've only lost it in one move, Command+Z, which brings me to a point--we're going to zoom out and stop right here.0670

I have this selection, I still need more but it took a while to get this much, so I'm going to go up to the Select menu, down to the bottom where it says Save Selection, and I'm going to save this part of my selection so I don't have to re-create it again.0689

I'm going to make a new channel and I'll call it Shoreline...part one...and I will click Save and now I'm going to de-select and I'm just going to mess around here and de-select.0704

I've gone a couple of moves past, I'm just doing that to add a couple of moves.0720

Now if I go backwards, I can't get back to that selection right away--I could use the History panel, but here's your selection, right here in the Channels panel, take a look, there it is, a black and white selection.0724

It's the black and white representation--there's our little mistake, there's absolutely everything of that selection and notice how it snapped back cleanly to the edge of the image.0738

To load this, you can go to the Select menu, Load Selection, and here's the channel--if you had more than one channel you click and there it is--Shoreline part one and click OK, I'm going to go Command or Control+D, or you can go Command or Control and click the channel.0751

Then to get back to your RGB, you can use Command+2 or hit the RGB channel and we're back--let's get back in the Quick Mask so we can see that mistake.0768

Where was that, we'll just work our way across, there it is, let's get out.0780

Take the freehand Lasso tool with the Option...we need to add that, we're not subtracting--it's Shift, plus, start inside and just draw right across the water there, corrected, we've got it.0785

Let's follow it along, see if there's anything else we need to correct...it's not too bad, looking pretty good at this point, missed a little bit in the water but for purposes here, we're going to take this out (the greenery) Option or Alt, just draw inside, take that out.0799

Same thing here with this tree--Option or Alt, freehand, and just draw it out, this one as well...notice I do this in small sections--stay within your comfort zone--you don't have to do the whole selection at one time, just what's comfortable.0818

And we'll take this piece out here as well...little tree...part of a house, so we'll just take that out, and what we're going to do now, is we have corrected the selection that's already saved, so actually I'll just go ahead and save it as a new one...we'll save over it because it's the same selection with slight corrections but it's still partial.0836

So what we're going to do, is we're going to hit the new channel, Shoreline part one which means we're going to save our selection over the other one...Command or Control+D, look at it and there's the corrected selection.0864

We'll load it back up--Command or Control, go to color, zoom out...it's working pretty good, you notice?0878

Alright, so now we need to add the tree line, so we have the Lasso, Shift to add, and let's just freehand in that area.0885

I made a mistake, I went the wrong way--I want to add a piece--don't worry about it, don't worry about it we'll come back and pick it up, it's that simple.0899

Here we go, I'm not going to deal with the little tree at the moment--I reached my comfort zone adding a piece.0909

I start inside, just so I can get into the rhythm on the edge, go a little further...add another piece, start here, add another piece, and now I've reached the end, I'll spacebar, move down, Shift and I'll just add in all this other sky area; Shift, circle it.0915

Now remember we made a mistake down here--if I look at the Quick Mask, I can see I need to take that out, take that out, take that out and a couple of others.0939

Now I'm going to show you how to use the Quick Mask to do this.0948

You paint--in the Quick Mask you paint with a normal paintbrush...and you notice it's very large--we'll make it smaller; left bracket makes it smaller, right bracket makes it larger--we'll bring it down, check the hardness...I'm going to just add about 50% because this edge is not completely hard.0953

And now...what the Quick Mask does--it paints with the foreground color of the two swatches--that's the one that's overlapping on the upper left--right now it's black, that means it paints mask--black is mask--watch.0975

In the area that was selected, I just painted mask.0991

Now, if I want to get rid of mask, I switch the colors--you can also do that with the letter X to get white as the foreground color, and paint away mask, that's all corrected.0994

We need to add mask, so we'll flip it back to the black, and we'll just paint...this is how you correct with the Quick Mask tool.1007

Zoom it up a little bit--I see some little edges--make the brush a little smaller, and let's just correct these little areas of green that I missed...not too many of them--it looks pretty decent.1020

OK, get out of Quick Mask, got the selection finished, let's save it...Select, Save Selection, now what we're going to call it is Complete Shoreline...I could save over the partial, but I'm just going to save the whole thing--Command or Control de-select--there was our partial, there's the complete one that's entirely repaired.1034

Let's load it--Command or Control click, there it is--RGB, now we can go in and I'm going to do this remember image adjustments--they're all here, they'll work right on the pixels.1060

I'm going to make what's called an Adjustment Layer, which we'll deal with in another lesson, you'll always be using these.1071

Curves; there's the same curves, it's up here and there by the way is your selection saved as what's called a mask--Option or Alt to visually see it, looks just like the channel doesn't it?1079

Because it is.1093

It's the same selection, but it's now attached to a layer in this case--Option or Alt, click again and it's out, and I want to get that curves back--you double click the layer, and we're going to take the black point...1094

Notice the histogram stops right here, there's nothing dark up in that from the shoreline up so we're going to darken it a little bit just by doing that--see how that works?1112

We'll put a point in at neutral gray in between the white at the top and the black at the bottom, right in the middle, and notice the histogram's here--obviously we need to move the curve toward the histogram--see how it comes down a little bit?1122

Let's snap the contrast by darkening the shadows--a point in the shadows and pull them just a little bit, lightens up the sky, and we'll click and close that--now I can turn it off and on and let's zoom up (Command or Control spacebar) and take a look at the edge of the water.1134

Look at that, it's beautiful, and it was a clean edge, just slightly soft, you can see that right here--see how the edge is not 100% hard, it's a couple of pixels--that's that two pixels of feather just softened it just a little bit so that it blends beautifully.1155

Checking there, now we missed slightly but I can live with that because that could be a reflection of the land mass.1175

We'll just keep moving over very quickly, and once again turn it off and on--still looking pretty good, and now let's zoom out a couple and look at the edging up here where the trees are--off and on--looking really good.1182

So what we did in that particular example, is we used the freehand Lasso tool--the polygonal Lasso tool, we used the quick selection tool and Magic Wand as an attempt--it decided to go the other way, and we used the Quick Mask you notice as a visual to observe what we're doing and see where it needs to be repaired and you also see that we can paint repairs with it as we move along.1197

And so we used almost all these tools to create that selection, saving it as we went so we didn't lose things, and in the end we got a very efficient selection with a nice job.1228

That's one way to use them together, let's take a look at another one.1239

I know this lesson's a bit long but I really want to show you this stuff so you understand how to think about what you're doing.1244

Here we've got another image--I think we used this for sky selection before.1252

Let's take a look at it as an overall shot and how we would proceed artistically.1256

Sky looks fine, mountains look pretty good, the greenery looks pretty good--we could use a little saturation increase maybe...overall but the glaring thing that gets me--forget the retouch of the power lines or the dead trees, but in the foreground all this marsh area--the grass is dead.1262

It really contrasts dramatically with everything above it--I would like to add color to try to match it up with this other grass in here--a little yellow with red in it maybe, how do we select that, that's a pretty complex selection isn't it?1281

We've got grass edges, we've got complex shapes, we've got trees in the way, we've got all this little stuff over here, whoa, what do you do here--you could spend a month with the Lasso tool, and the quick selection tool isn't really going to do a great job, it's going to have a hard time finding those edges accurately.1297

We can do some of it, but look what happened already, it slammed out into the water--we come up in here in the tree area, and it went up into the water again and we come over here, and it's just--that is just going to be a nightmare to fix, that's not working.1319

If we try to use the Magic Wand, it's just not going to happen--even if I go up to like, 55 on the tolerance and click, it's just too far, so what do we do--we can't do it with the freehand--that's going to be forever too, how do we do this efficiently?1335

Aha, the Quick Mask.1351

We can create selection from scratch using the Quick Mask function, so now it's active I want to double click it and show you...you can change the color and the opacity and you can also play with whether the color is a masked area or a selected area.1354

For the last example we were using the color as a mask selection.1377

You saw when we made our selection, everything inside the selection was transparent, and we could see the edges where the masked area was.1382

In this case, and you saw how we paint with foreground color, you can just paint, so we could paint a mask and try to paint everything around the dead grass--we'll just switch the color.1391

This time when we paint, it's going to be the selected area so we can see exactly what we want to paint--we'll click OK, we'll get our brush, we're going to make the brush fairly soft--not completely--down around the 20% range, increase the brush size--right bracket key, zoom up a little bit, and here we can just paint black.1405

I didn't have the Quick Mask activated--it was painting black on my image--click the Quick Mask--you don't see anything, just see that the mask is highlighted, now we can paint, and there it is.1430

All you have to do is paint the grass...very simple, so we're just going to go along...we could make that brush even softer, I can see that right now--notice how the edge--we could stand and just go ahead and have a soft edge on it, make the brush even a little larger...and just painting.1443

Now we're painting by the way at 100% opacity because we want to just completely select--this is not a mask this time, remember we switched it over in Quick Mask so that we are painting a selection, so let's go into the dead grass back in here, come on up...get fairly close--you don't want to get too bad--make the brush a little bit smaller.1465

Notice how quickly this is working?1491

Back in here--I can make it even smaller, I can even pick up that little edge there, we can even go along the shoreline here, and select this section of dead grass back in there--fill it in, fill in a little we missed right there...anything else?1495

Yes, we got another dead section out here...right down to there, and that's pretty much got it...looks pretty good, so now as soon as we click this, it's going to turn it into the selection.1512

There it is, remember that's because we made this color indicate selected areas at this time, so now we have the selection--what do we do with it--we made a selection?1531

I heard you say it, save it; Select, Save Selection, we're going to call it Dead Grass--that'll tell us what it is--click OK, there it is in the channels.1544

I'm going to de-select it, hit the channel, zoom up and you can see where I painted, the channel value is--see the spots were not filled in so we can go back now on the channel and paint in black...and paint it white, excuse me, and fill back in any of those little spots that we now can see.1557

That's where the channels really become handy--you can see if you missed anything on the inside--that looks pretty good, so we will load it, Command or Control click, go back to RGB, and there's our selection.1579

Very complicated selection done very easily by painting with the Quick Mask, so let's go ahead and see what happens.1594

We want to do hue saturation, so remember it could've been Image Adjustments--do it right on the pixels--but I'm going to use hue saturation in an Adjustment Layer, it comes up and there again is that selection saved as a layer mask--the same selection as we have as a channel, and we're going to double click and we're going to take...1600

Actually I didn't want to do hue saturation--I'll leave that alone for a moment--I'm going to reload that selection and you do it on this mask the same way; Command or Control click the little thumbnail, it's loaded.1625

I wanted to do a color balance...my mistake, but we'll leave that when we haven't made any modifications with the hue saturation.1637

I'm going to hit my screen view and move this over so we can see it, and in that area because it's got the mask on it, if we add red notice it's only doing it in that area--a little bit of red, and bump the yellows, oh my, that's looking pretty good.1646

Actually...that's pretty nice.1665

Now, I see right now that the hue saturation of that grass is more than the other grass, so what we're going to do is a little trick; we're going to take the hue saturation mask, which right now is a little advanced, is...1670

This is the selected area--the dead grass--actually what I'd like to do is select everything else and up that hue saturation--you understand--leave the grass alone.1693

So we're just going to take and highlight that--go Command or Control+I and look what happened...it inverted that mask so that the hue saturation is working on everything else--you could've done this another way (let's take it back) we could just load the selection, go to the Select menu, go to Inverse.1702

And then we could trash that particular thing--now notice the inverse because the crawling ants are on the outside of the image, and are going around--let's check it with a Quick Mask...see?1725

The selection is the inside, everything else--excuse me, that's not right, we changed that.1738

We're going to show masked areas--click OK, and go back.1745

Now we have masked out all of the dead grass and the remainder of the picture is what we're dealing with, so we're going to go hue saturation of everything but the grass, following me?1749

We've inverted--see it's exactly--here's the color balance on the grass, and here's the hue saturation on everything else, get that back--Option or Alt (get that away) and open up the hue saturation and we're going to take the master saturation level and just up it, and there it comes...perfect.1764

Perfect, and what I want to show you--let's zoom up here and look at our color balance, which is what we did, and we'll turn it off, and turn it on--look, with those soft edges on that selection I can't see any evidence anywhere, even in the water, look at that...1790

Beautiful with the soft edge of that selection, you don't see any problems with blending--that's the key here (close that, turn it off and on) look over in there, beautiful job.1811

So there you have how you work multiply with separate tools to make singular selections, how to save those selections as you go along to save yourselves trouble.1828

Also, how to use the Quick Mask tool--let's go back to our original title...and we painted with a Quick Mask...let's put another layer on top...1843

We've painted with the Quick Mask to adjust a selection...now you can paint away or paint more mask.1859

We also painted a new selection in the second one with Quick Mask, and then we took two examples and used multiple tools in singular selections as we built them up piece by piece, all using the tools and functions in Photoshop CS6 for selections.1868