How to Create Selections in Photoshop | Day 5

welcome to 30 days of Photoshop today we're learning all about selections hey there and welcome to phlearn my name is Aaron NACE you can find me on phlearn comm where we make learning fun and in today's video we're showing you how to use selections in photoshop selections are an incredibly powerful tool in Photoshop that allow you to edit certain parts of your image whether you want to color a certain area of your image or cut someone out of their background selections are the key to getting this done in this video we're going to show you different tools and resources for creating selections we'll show you how to save and load your selections and even how to cut your subject out of the background using selections we had a great tutorial for you let's jump into Photoshop so we'll start by opening up our image we are in day 5 selections now you can actually download this image on phlearn com just follow the link in the description right down below and I'm going to hit f4 full screen so we're gonna start off with our selection tools on the top of our tool dialog so at the very top you're gonna see your marquee tools let's press and hold right here on your marquee you'll see a rectangular an elliptical single row and single column marquee so let's go to our rectangular marquee now if you click and drag here you're going to make a very simple selection on your image if you go to select and down to deselect your selection disappears now we're gonna make a new layer because we're gonna go ahead and fill that selection with a color so again let's go ahead and make another one we're gonna click and drag okay I'm gonna go to edit and then down to fill and we're just gonna choose to fill this with white there we go and deselect by hitting ctrl or command D so as you can see this is on a new layer I can use my move tool by pressing V and move this around my image in here we just have a white block very very easy to move around now let's say you want to continue with my selection so I'm gonna go back to my selection tool we're going to make another selection here and I'm gonna go to edit down to fill and we're gonna fill this with white as well let's deselect by hitting ctrl or command D so now you can see I can continue to move this around so using my selection tool I'm able to make different shapes now I'm gonna go back to my selection tool once more we're gonna make a selection here in the middle and while I'm creating my selection I'm gonna hold down the spacebar which is gonna allow me to move this selection while I'm actually making it so let's go ahead and put it right about there and I'm gonna click on the Delete key which is gonna delete that area from this layer so this selection can stay active no matter what layer you're on for instance I'm on this layer right now that I can turn off and on if I create a new layer okay and I go to edit and then down the fill and we're gonna just choose to fill this with 50% gray and hit ok now let's deselect by hitting ctrl or command D I can then use my move tool and see that this is on a completely different layer so the same selection can be active on different layers so selections and layers are completely separate basically you can only edit inside of that selection and then you can choose which layer you'd like to add it on so let's go ahead and delete both of those layers and show you a little bit more how to create selections so back to our rectangular marquee tool we're gonna click and drag now again if I hold the spacebar I can move this around while I create it if I hold shift it's going to constrain my aspect ratio so now we're just creating a square so I can hold shift and the spacebar to move this around it if I would like there we go and that looks great I'm gonna go ahead and let go now let's say we want to add to this selection I can hold shift there we go and you can see as I do we have a little plus sign next to my selection icon there we go and I can simply add to my selection let's hold the spacebar down and let go and you can see I've added to this selection if I hold alt or option we have a little minus icon and I can - out from that selection so again the only area that I'd be able to edit is this area within the shape that I made now I can continue to switch my selection tools I don't have to just use the same selection tool to continue to add to my selection so let's go up ahead over here to the elliptical marquee tool want to hold the shift key there we go and create an ellipse the shift key will add so there we go we've then added to my selection okay we got something looks like a choo-choo train or something if I hold alt or option we're going to then subtract away from the selection okay and then let's go ahead and I'm gonna go back to my rectangular marquee hold alt or option and subtract this away I want to create something like you know 3d sunglass looking things would you wear at the movie theater so again on a new layer I'm gonna go to fill and we'll fill that 50% great and you can see I just made this shape and then filled it with a color now of course this has applications for graphics and text and logos and things like that not as much of an application just yet for photographs but we're gonna get into that in just a second so let's go ahead and delete this so we've seen using the marquee tool how we can add and remove from our selections using the rectangular and the elliptical now we have other selection tools that are disposable as well we have the lasso tool the polygonal lasso tool and right under it is the magnetic lasso tool so the lasso tool will actually allow you to draw any selection that you'd like and we're gonna be using some of these tools to try to cut out our subject so you can see I can just draw a selection right around our subject and I can definitely try to draw a subject you know a lasso selection around our subject and try to cut her out with this tool although it's pretty difficult you can see it's I mean I'm not trying to do the best job in the world but it's kind of tough to just draw a perfect line around a subject now I could just click on my layer mask and then that just cut out from the background but as we can see it's not that great so we want a little bit of a better tool so the next one we're gonna take a look at is our polygonal lasso tool and with this tool you basically click to make your selection now again with the person this might not be the best tool if you're working with architecture or something like that that was just straight lines this would be a little bit better now here's a quick little tip if you hold alt or option this actually will switch back to a regular lasso tool let go of alt or option and you're going to go back to Apple in lasso tool the same is actually true with the lasso tool painting or making a selection with the lasso tool is very fluid hold alt or option and then it becomes your polygonal lasso tool release alter option and then it's just back to the regular lasso tool so again anytime I have a selection that's the area that's gonna get affected in my image now we're gonna go back down to the very bottom here this is called the magnetic lasso tool and what this does is it actually tries to follow edges of your image so I simply click once and I'm bringing my cursor around the edge here and it's gonna do a best its best job to try to follow the edges of our subject and if you have a pretty good line around your subject this tool generally does a pretty good job there we go and we'll just kind of paint this right around there and come in you can hit the backspace key to change to route undo or delete a couple points let's go ahead and double click to apply that and click on our layer mask and see how it did pretty good actually around the shirt not so great around the hair but in general it did pretty well so these are the tools that we can use to either freehand or create polygons or use magnetic lasso so now we have a couple of other tools at our disposal as well so here's our magic wand tool and the quick selection tool now the magic wand tool you can simply click on an area and it will select everything that's relatively similar so in this case it's selecting the background color now I'm gonna deselect by hitting ctrl or command D and I want a little bit less selected because you can see I clicked on the background but it started to select inside of my subject so what we're gonna do is I'm going to bring my tolerance down tolerance is the amount that it actually gets selected so we're gonna bring this down to 15 and hope that it selects a little bit less so there we go you can see it 15 it is not selecting inside of my subject we're gonna hold the shift key and add to this just like we did with our rectangular marquee tool I've added a little bit too much there we go let's hold shift and add to this a couple times there okay and that looks pretty good let's hold shift and add right over there okay and that actually looks pretty good now in this case it actually tried to cut our subject out but it did the opposite of what we want not a big deal remember on a layer mask dark makes areas invisible and light makes areas visible so all I have to do is click on my layer mask itself and hit ctrl a command I to invert the layer mask and here we can see what it did now at this point if we wanted to do a little bit of cleanup we could do that let's go ahead and grab our regular lasso tool I'm gonna zoom in and we're just gonna make a selection right over here okay this area I want to be white on my layer mask I want this to show so I'm gonna hit shift delete which is the keyboard shortcut for the fill dialog and we're gonna fill this with white on our layer mask there we go now we're gonna do the same thing so I'm gonna make a selection right over here okay shift delete fill that with white and we're looking a little bit better and we'll do the same thing down here shift delete fill that with white and we're looking a little bit better there as well all right so we can see how using selections we can really do a nice job cutting out our subject and I realize this is actually not perfect there are many more advanced ways that you can do this and we're gonna continue to show you better and better ways to do this so we're not done here if you're like ooh that doesn't look that great Aaron yep you're right about that okay so let's go back to our layer mask I'm gonna hit shift delete which is the keyboard for the fill dialog and we're just gonna fill the whole thing with white again so the next tool we're gonna take a look at is the quick selection tool and the quick selection tool will actually just allow us to kind of paint in an area and it fills it in with anything that it thinks is similar okay now in this case it's doing a pretty decent job there we go selecting out our background so we're gonna go over here but in this case you see what it did select it a little bit too much so you can hold alt or option + - out areas that you don't want to be selected and it does a pretty good job at knowing what you want to add or remove from that selection okay let's go ahead and invert that on our layer mask and see how that did again totally okay we would definitely want to go in here with like our lasso tool for instance and fix it up especially around her eye because that looks really super creepy actually there we go and let's go ahead and fill that with white okay so you can see all of these selection tools basically allow you to edit only in those areas let's go ahead and fill that layer mask completely with white again so we showed you how to use different selection tools now there are actually selections available within the Select menu so we're gonna go up to select and I'm gonna go down to color range and this is actually going to allow me to select based on color so I can select based on with my eyedropper here based on the subjects skin or let's say I wanted to sum up my subject out I'd actually be a lot better selecting out the background color now the white on my background gets selected the dark areas do not get selected and you have a few different options right here for your selection preview so if it if it doesn't look like anything it might be set to none I prefer mine set to grayscale the lighter areas get selected and the darker areas do not so let's go ahead and bring our fuzziness down which is just gonna select less and less and less there we go and that's actually starting to look pretty good now I'm gonna click on this little plus eyedropper and click right over here there we go looks like it's a little bit too different from where I had selected that's totally okay so let's go ahead and bring this down a little bit more and this election actually looks pretty good so in this case it's gonna select out the light colors and not select the darks so let's hit OK there now it added that automatically to my layer mask because that's a setting that I had applied so let's invert our layer mask by hitting controller command I now I know not perfect just yet but we can make this a lot better so let's try it again click on our layer we're gonna go back to select and then down to color range okay and we're gonna go ahead and click here on our eyedropper and we're gonna click here on our background so let's go ahead and click and add this and then we'll bring our fuzziness down because I don't really want it selecting up much of our much of the subjects shirt alright let's go ahead and eat it okay there and then now I'm gonna click on my layer mask and we're just gonna use our brush tool and paint with black so there we go let's go ahead and paint black right over here and make that invisible okay so at this point we're looking pretty good not perfect just yet mind you but pretty good so let's take a look at our layer mask I'm gonna hold alt or option and click on our layer mask and we need to do some cleanup now right so let's just grab our regular lasso tool okay I'm gonna make some selections and hit shift delete and fill those with black right because this is like you know we don't really want these areas to be visible so shift delete we'll just fill that with black and then the same thing right over here right get rid of this little area here shift delete and fill that black now these areas on the inside there we go I'm gonna hold alt or option here to turn this into a polygonal lasso tool like we learned how to do earlier and fill that with black in these areas on the inside we actually want these to be white right so we're gonna just make these into a selection right down here hold shift delete and change that to white and the same with all this inside here right all this needs to be white we don't need this to be semi visible there we are so all this is done with selections I'm just using selections in different fills alright and let's go ahead and see how this looks I'm going again to hold alt or option shift lead and fill that Boop shift lead I meant to hit black shift lead and fill that with black there we go now that layer mask is actually starting to look pretty good right let's go ahead and make one last selection over here shift delete and fill this with white there we go so let's hold alt or option and click on our layer mask and we can see yeah that's actually starting to look really good now we do have some areas that aren't exactly perfect right here so that moves us into our next tool which is called select and mask which actually allows us to refine this edge so let's go over here to select and mask it's going to be visible if you're on any selection tool or you can simply go to select and then down to select and mask so within select and mask you can then paint on the areas that you don't want to be visible there we go so you can see I'm simply painting on these areas and it's smart enough to know what should or should not be included in your selection so you can simply just bulk add or remove to your selection with the quick selection tool but for the most part we use the refine edge tool to refine the edge so here I'm simply painting right along this edge and it knows the difference between the subject skin color and the background color and it does a really nice job refining that edge for us there we go we'll paint a little bit in there and that looks really nice so you have a few different ways of viewing this okay right now I've got it set to the overlay and dad totally works for me so it's gonna output this to my layer mask let's hit OK and we can see what a nice job that did cleaning it up so here's the before and the after with that using select and mask fantastic now let's go ahead and duplicate this layer because there are a few other selection tools that I want to show you let's delete this layer mask so we're gonna click on the layer mask and drag it down to the trash can and hit delete so we have our original layer that's actually cut out pretty well and then we have our new layer which is basically a duplicate of the original now we're gonna try a new tool in Photoshop called selects subject so we'll go to select and we're gonna just go down to subject now this tool actually uses AI to try to figure out what is your subject and we'll see what it how it does it actually did a pretty decent job selecting our subject let's click on our layer mask and we can see well actually I think it did a really nice job cutting out our subject now not a hundred percent perfect I would definitely want to go in here with a couple of our tools and kind of clean this up a little bit there we go alright and we'll hit shift delete and fill this with black fantastic but you can see as a rough selection goes and a rough cut out goes select subject actually did a pretty nice job so there are many different ways to make selections in Photoshop and once you have these selections active then you can edit inside of those selections now let's use selections to do a little bit editing on our photo so let's go back to our image I'm gonna hold shift and click on our layer mask to disable it we're gonna use our simple elliptical marquee selection we're gonna zoom in and make a selection right around our subjects eye there we go that looks pretty good and now I'm going to simply grab an adjustment layer we're gonna go to curves and I'm gonna go a little bit brighter and because I've made a selection let's make our darks a little bit darker while making the lights brighter because I made a selection of this area it's only going to affect what's actually in that selection ok so again anything you do with selections no matter what tool you're using the selection will only allow you to edit in that area I'm just gonna paint black on my layer mask just a little bit right there cuz it didn't look super natural alright and then we're just gonna do the same thing right over here as well so again paint in with my marquee tool and then this time I'll just use my white brush tool for the brush tool painting with white to just brighten up that eye a little bit so there we go very very simple we used a selection to change those colors now if I wanted to let's say you select the lips let's try this again so in this case what we're gonna do is I'm gonna create a solid color of fill layer okay we're gonna go to a nice bright color and I'm gonna invert my layer mask then I'm gonna use my lasso tool to try to trace around lips now we're keeping things relatively simple there actually are a lot more advanced selection tools like the pen tool that we're gonna be covering later in these 30 days for now I want to just give you a good idea of basically how these selection tools work okay now on our layer mask we're gonna invert that area on the layer mask so I made a selection we're inverting that I'm gonna change this from normal to overlay now let's go to soft light it'll be a little bit more subtle now we're gonna blur the edge of this selection so let's go to filter blur and over to Gaussian blur there we go and I just need to blur the edge to make it look a little bit more realistic okay that looks good and of course this color is way too strong so we're gonna zoom out here a little bit double click right here on my solid color fill layer and now I'm just going to change the color of the solid color fill so as you can see I'm able to alter the color of my subjects lips there we go give it a little bit of color and there we have it so based on a simple lasso selection we can now do things like change color of our subjects lips which basically I was trying to give her like you know the look of she has a little bit of lipstick on or something like that but we oftentimes think about you know these simple selection tools like the lasso tool and think oh that's so simple what could I possibly use that for but hopefully in this case you see oh cool it actually does have some really cool uses so now let's go ahead and show you how to save selections and load selections so you can get them back later so we're gonna start off with our type tool so I'm gonna hit T for the type tool and I'm gonna type in selections are great because they are selections are great so now what we're gonna do let's go ahead to our character menu I need to just bring that size way down because it's huge there we go let's use our move tool to see about that selections are great if you can't tell I really like Photoshop ok selections are great I'm gonna make her lips a little more subtle because it was a little bit too much there we go now you can actually make selections from any layer so here we have a type layer there we go let's make this a little bit smaller ctrl or command T we're just gonna shrink that down a little bit more okay selections our great now if I want to make any layer into a selection simply hold ctrl or command and click on that layer so we're gonna hold ctrl or command + I click on this type layer and look at that it turn into a selection so now I can just turn the layer off but I have my selection still visible so let's go ahead and save this out so we're gonna go to select and down to save selections ok selections are great and hit ok now we can deselect now many many years down the line or five minutes from now we can always get back here and load that exact selection so if you did a lot of work to create a very nice selection using multiple tools you can save it out so you can get back to it at any time so let's go up here to select don't do load selections and I'm gonna just choose selections are great and hit OK and there we go look at that we've got it back so now it's kind of fun is I'm gonna go ahead and grab a curves adjustment layer there we go and it loads that selection into my curves adjustment layer and I can simply make that area a little bit brighter or I could make that area a little bit darker on my image okay and I can still move this around if I wanted to okay so this is actually you know a curves adjustment layer makes areas brighter in your image and because I have a selection loaded into it check this out it's simply making the area brighter that I actually have selected which is incredibly cool alright let's make that invisible we'll do this one one more cool thing we'll go back to select load selection again okay and here we can go to selections are great and now on a new layer I'm gonna hit G for our gradient tool okay let's just choose our foreground to transparent color I don't choose this is my foreground color and now I'm gonna just do a giant gradient there we go and we can deselect and see that basically I just did this color fading to invisible okay you can see there it again now let's say you want to be able to affect what's in your selection but you don't want to see this selection you can hit ctrl or command H to temporarily hide this selection it's so active you can still see I'm able to edit just what's inside this selection but I don't see it so it gives me a much clearer idea of what I'm actually doing there we go and you can deselect again by hitting ctrl or command D so there we have it and as you can clearly see selections really are great so anytime you want to edit just a certain part of your photo the key is to first create a selection and anytime you want to cut your subject out of their background first make a selection and then load that into a layer mask thank you so much for watching if you haven't already done so be sure to sign up for 30 days of Photoshop it's absolutely free you can do it by clicking on the link right down below we'll send you a calendar of each of the 30 days an email reminder so you guys can stay up to date and sample images as well as extra bonus amazing goodies that are only available through our 30 days of Photoshop series thank you so much I hope you enjoy it I'll see you tomorrow bye everyone

Channel: PHLEARN

Views: 206,120

Keywords: Phlearn, Photography, Aaron Nace, Photoshop, Adobe, Tutorial, Help, Tips, How-to, Education, Adobe Photoshop, Class, Course, Learn Photoshop, photoshop tutorials, how to make selections, how to cut out hair, select and mask photoshop, how to cut out anything in photoshop, photoshop make a selection, photoshop tutorial for beginners, select and mask, photoshop tips, photoshop cc, how to, photoshop tips and tricks, photoshop selections

Id: Erfx1cqM1Hs

Length: 25min 34sec (1534 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 06 2020