How to make selections in
Photoshop
In almost every photoshop project you have to make selections to isolate an
object. There are many ways to make selections in photoshop and in this tutorial
I will tell you these methods and which one you should use in which situation.
If you can make perfect selections your photoshop projects will look great and
very professional.
Make your selection with the
original photo. This counts for all photoshop editing you want to do. All edits
will be better in the original, big photo. Don’t resize your photo until all
edits are done. Sometimes you maybe even want to zoom in on your image to make
the selection.
Options
With all methods you will see these options on top of the screen:
The first one is “new selection”, if you choose this one all currently active selections will go away and you will start a new one.
The second one will add your upcoming selection to the currently active one. (if they overlap it will morph into one selection) The keyboard shortcut for this one is shift (you have to hold it down).
The third one will substract from your current selection. Handy if you selected too much and want to remove something. The keyboard shortcut for this one is alt (you have to hold it down).
The last one will make a new
selection formed by the intersection of your selections.
These options are very handy.
With these options you don’t have to make sure your selection will be perfect
in the first try, you can still edit it!
If your object is easier to
select, but you want to select the background, you can make the selection and
then go to: select-> inverse. This will inverse your selection.
If you want to save a selection
because you want to use it later you can go to: selection -> save selection.
Magic Wand (w)
With the magic wand tool you can select all the colors of one or similar colors. This is the quickest way to make a selection, but can only be used if your object and background are different colors and one of the two has only one color.
This tool is handy for example this photo:
The sky is clear blue, so, easy to remove.
At the top of your screen you can select “tolerance” , how higher the number how more pixels it will select. You always have to click a few times to discover what number is good. For this picture I used 100.
If you want to remove all the blue parts at once (which I didn’t in the example) you can unselect “contiguous” in the options menu at the top of your screen.
If the computer selected something
you didn’t want or didn’t select something you did want, you can edit the selection
by hand. Choose the Polygonal lasso tool and hold down shift or alt to add some
more pixels to your selection or remove some pixels from your selection.
Magnetic lasso
With the magnetic lasso tool you can select an object with different colors, but there has a to be a good visible border between object and background. You have to draw the selection yourself, but the computer will snap to a high-contrast edge automatically.
If the computer doesn’t snap to the place you want you can click and it will go there, and remember you can always edit your selection.
Lasso (l)
With this tool you can draw freehand and make a selection that way. Just click and drag your mouse. If you want to make a straight line, hold down alt, if you let go of the alt you can continue with your freehand drawing. I actually never use this tool. Even with a tablet I can’t get a good selection.
Polygonal Lasso (l)
With this tool you can only
make straight lines. Weirdly enough, I use this tool a lot to isolate objects.
If you make enough small straight lines they can also look like a curved line!
I really like the control you have with this tool.
It’s really handy for object with a lot of straight lines, and a few curved lines.
For example in this photo:
My selection line is maybe not very easy to see, but it is there! In the upper right corner you see that my navigator is at 66%, bad example! Should be at least 100%.
Mask
I think this is the most common way to make selections. To make a mask click on “edit in quick mask mode” , a button with a grey rectangle and a white circle in it (or press Q on your keyboard). Your foreground and background colors will switch to black and white.
Now pick a normal, small brush and start painting your selection! Use a soft brush for difficult subjects like hair. If you paint with black it means you will select that part. On your photo black is’t black tough, but a 50% red color. The 50% transparency will help you to see if you didn’t paint too much.
If you did paint too much, you can remove it with switching to white. The white will function as an eraser. This way you can make selections very detailed! The more time you spend making a mask, the better the result. A tablet would be very handy for this job, but it’s also very good possible with a mouse. If you are done with painting click the white rectangle with the white circle (or press Q again).
Now your red paint is transformed into a selection. With clicking Q again you can still go back to your mask to edit it!
Example of a mask:
I always only draw the border, not the whole part I want to select. I delete my border and then I delete the big part with the wand tool. It’s quicker than coloring everything. Unlike my previous example I do give a good example with the navigator on 300% this time!
Channels
Sometimes you can’t see the difference between the background and the object very well. In that case, channels are very handy. For example in this photo:
The photo is very dark, and very difficult to select.
Go to window -> channels, and click on red, green and blue and see which one has the best contrast. In this case it’s the red channel.
To make the contrast even better you can go to: image -> adjustments -> brightness contrast and play around with the settings.
Channels and contrast can also help to make the Wand Tool and Magnetic Lasso do their job better.
Make sure you duplicate your original layer first, then change the contrast, then make the selection, remove the duplicated layer and then delete what’s in the selection. Else you don’t have your original contrast and colors anymore.
Inspiration
At last, here are some great designs I discovered on the internet and show what cool things you can do with selections. (ok, in most examples more photoshop techniques are used, but it all started with selections!)
- http://www.worth1000.com/entries/222500/222717HmPL_w.jpg
-http://i119.photobucket.com/albums/o155/nancy_kelpie/WIPpasen.jpg
- http://www.worth1000.com/entries/22500/22846_w.jpg
Feel free to ask any questions about this tutorial in a reply to this topic.
Greetings nancy