How to Select & Mask ANYTHING in Photoshop!

cotton trees and plants might look hard but it's easy to do you will know how in this video my name is now redwan and you are tuned to photomanipulation.com we are not your typical photoshop channel we specialize in photo manipulation digital art and advanced photoshop techniques if that sounds like a kind of thing be sure to like and subscribe as we put out new videos every weekday it's free easy and really supports the channel let's watch the video [Music] enjoy [Music] to cut the tree from its background is very easy some people find out it's very hard because it has this hard edges and some people and how people usually cut these trees they zoom in and they start selecting every edge that's coming out from the tree and that will take a lot of time so i'm not going to do that i'm going to use the select and mask and the way to do that i'm going to use the lasso tool and if you didn't know already you can use the laser tool and the polygonal tool at the same time that's by clicking on any area and as you can see now i'm selecting with the lasso tool but if i want the polygonal tool i'm going to click and hold alt and then take your finger from the mouse button and you will find out that you are working with the polygon with the straight line and if i click again i'm working with the laser tool again so this is a very very useful shortcuts it saved me a lot of time cutting these trees and houses and sometimes models sometimes i use it more the more than the pen tool yeah it's very useful if you have a nice hand if you know how to work with the mouse so i'm going to select this tree right here and then just by clicking on the laser tool and then with the polygonal tool i'm going to select the edges i don't have to be very specific just select the edges just like that and when you are finished click on select and mask and here is a very good way to work with these settings what i do and it's a very enjoyable uh let's say tip uh it's good for making you feel that you are working in a quicker way and that is click on the shift and hold it and using the arrow keys up and down if i add you will realize that it's adding by 10 values not one the way i like to do it because if you start to add by one value at the time you will get it will take a lot of time to notice that there is some changes in the three edges so if you click shift and you add with the arrow keys you will start to add by 10 points and look at the preview here till you get a nice edges in my case i got my i get a good results with the value of 30 so then let's click on the contrast and again click and hold the shift and let's start adding by 10 points and then let's go to smooth and let's do the same and with the shift edges let's start to uh increasing or decreasing i want to get rid of this black points on the tree so i'm going to increase it yeah till these black points are gone let's click okay and then let's go back to the select and mask and let's start to add the radius again and then let's click let's add the sorry let's add the contrast again and that's just to get a harder edges because in the last one we got smooth ones uh and we did the first one just to get rid of the black points so now we don't have to worry about them and then click ok and now if you mask it out you will get a nice edges here but in these areas i wanted the edges or to be uh more soft and to go into the tree model so i'm going to select this area is right here and then this area is right here and let's go back to the select and mask and this time let's add a lot of radius yeah this is good and then let's add contrast and then click ok and make sure the black color is on the other side and click on remove and you will remove it and this is how i usually cut my trees from a messy background let's say that this tree is in a forest or something so yeah in if you add here a black background you will find out that is not the best selection of a tree but if you add this tree to a scene that you are working on let's say i'm working on this forest background and i added this tree no one will realize the selection so yeah it will get it will be blended with the rest of the trees and the background this is a very quick way now i'm going to show you how to select these furnaces uh the the plants and the trees like that let's move on to the next ones so let's start with this three picture right here i use that for my fantasy forest artwork and the way i cut this tree is by going to select but first i'm going to make a duplicate layer from this tree and i'm going to select and then click on the color range and make sure the select option is on sample the colors and what you want to do is select this icon right here or just click shift on your keyboard and you will realize that there is a plus sign on the icon and if you press alt you will see there is a minus icon so what you want to pricing up just use the shift which is the plus sign uh the plus plus icon and if you want to darken an area just click on the alt just like that as you can see so i'm going to brighten up the background so i'm going to click on every point on the background and then i'm going to select these points right here to darken it up going back to the background and this is how it works i'm going to click ok and then i'm going to click on make a mask from a selection then click and hold alt and click on the mask and you will be inside that mask and then what you want to do here is just clean these areas inside the trees by painting on it with a black brush i'm not going to go on every single point and clean it just click on control l and just move that drop this point to the right side and this to the left side this will do a more specific cleaning up in some areas and then click ctrl i to inverse it and let's add a black background to see what we call it so yeah and to cut this part just use the just use the select and mask as we covered in the first couple of five minutes of the video let's go to the mask and then let's select and mask and click on the radius and hold shift and let's start moving this radius up till we get a nice edges and then let's move it with the shifts and the arrow keys up let's do the same with the contrast till we get rid of this messy out lines and then with the shift edge let's make it minus 20 just for the sharper edges let's make it more contrasty and let's go back and with the shift and f5 select black and let's click ok and let's delete this with make sure the black color is on the other side because if it's not and you select this area and you click you will add it's like you are painting with the white color so make sure the black color is on the other side and when you do and you click remove you will remove it from the mask so yeah for this tree in the other side i didn't really cause it in my fantasy forest i just put those three on the edge of the artwork so this tree is not visible anymore if you have the time you can just go and select every point that this tree is shown and then select and mask add the radius click ok and delete it from the mask just if you have the time if you don't you don't have to just make sure to hide this in your artwork so now let's move to the other uh image okay so we have this fern plant and as you can see it's almost impossible to cut and i gotta say there is no way you can cut these plants in a very perfect way even if you have even if you have all the time and you start to use the pencil for every single edge for this plant or even if you have a graphic tablet it will not work believe me but so the way to get a close-up or a nearly perfect results is like the upcoming you will cut in a way that no one will notice that you cut it in your artwork just like how the concept artist do it start selecting the edges and try not to go out of the specific blend that you want to cut off from the image so as you can see i just selected the furnace i'm going to feather this selection by let's leave it at 20 and let's go to the select and mask now we are going to use the select and mask multiple times so with the shift and radius with the arrow keys hold the shift and start adding the value let's add a little bit of contrast and then click ok and now we are going to select add mask again and let's add the radius with the shift and the arrow keys let's add contrast and now what i'm going to do is going to select add modify and then let's select contract and let's select let's say maybe 10 pixels and then let's go back to the select and mask let's select radius and do this again and then let's add more contrast and mark it out and you can add it to your artwork i know it's not the perfect way to do it you can use the select end mask more times to get more solid edges and more accurate more detailed edges let's use this mode and in this layer you will see that this object is messy it's not very perfect but believe me when you add it to your artwork no one will notice because let's say you add it to a first you are working on a forest scene and you add this it will get it will be blended with the rest of the plants and the trees also it's better than just cutting it in straight lines it's better than nothing so yeah this is how you cut messy plants in a messy background where there is no white background or clean background you can just you can always go and fix it if only if you have the time let's go to the mask and make sure the block is on on the other side and click on remove just to remove these areas right here that's outside of our plant i guarantee you when you add this plant to your artwork you don't have to worry about that it will not show at all so yeah let's move to the next one as you can see now i'm having this picture of a model and it's it's a clean background so you can just use the pen tool but if you go back to my viking murderer in my first artwork on this channel i use the select and mask to cut it and a lot of people ask me how you did this very quickly and the way is simple just choose the magic one tool with the the value of maybe around the 15 sorry 50 and let's select the background just like that it will never be perfect you you'll always have to go back and fix some areas sometimes it works better than the pen tool so yeah now we select our model go to select and mask and again click shift and hold it and with the arrow keys up till we get nice edges as you can see the sword starts to vanish but we got nice uh edges on the hair and if you zoom zoomed in on his legs you will see that there is some whites getting into his body so with this contrast and shield just start to add it and you will realize that we are fixing it but i'm not going to fix it a lot because i like the hair and yeah the only problem here is the sword i'm going back to it let's click ctrl i to invert the selection and just select the burn tool and maybe the dodge tool and start adding the sword again make sure to not go outside the sword so we don't mess the background we just did so let's use the polygonal tool with the lasso tool yeah take your time and we just did it and remove it from the selection and let's get back these details on these sword and let's add them back and i'm going back here but now i'm going to use the brush because these areas are so hard to do with the polygonal tool and just to make sure that you got you didn't get this uh messy uh white color or the black spots on your model just click on ctrl l and move the black the dark points uh slide to the right and the highlights to the left so we don't have to face this problem again and as you can see we did good job with the curtain just a little bit white edges here and to fix that make sure to go to the model and select everything but the hair and then let's go to blur and click on blur and then let's go back and blur more and then while the selection is still active click on ctrl l and move the dark areas slide to the left side and as you can see the white spots outside the model is getting vanished and we did it no more white spots you can just you can always go back to the hair and remove this annoying white spots by select and mask and again hold shift and start moving your arrow keys with the contrast and it's with the black color yeah and you can paint the hair again let's go to the up upper areas of his head and blur blur more and with the ctrl l let's remove it and yeah this is a perfect selection once you get it in the scene and you start to paint the hair again and all of that so let's move on to the next one here we have this messy tree these trees in the messy background it's not very messy you can see here it's white's clean background but here you have these trees and to get rid of them just go to the channel sorry channels and try to find a channel with the uh higher contrast between these trees and the background and most of the time you will find that the blue channel is the channel with the higher contrast between the object and the background sometimes it's trees or mountains or a landscape so yeah it's most of the time the blue channel so let's click on control till you see that square in your mouse icon then click on the blue channel and it will select it for you so let's go and click on the make selection from make a new channel from selection photoshop will create this alpha one channel for you so click on it and make sure you are not clicking on the blue channel because if you are and you start to mess with this with the highlights of it you will find out that you are messing with the colors of the original image so always make sure you are on the alpha channel and while you are on the alpha channel click on ctrl l and then you will find that there is two eye drops on the levels one is to darken the areas and the other is to highlight the areas i'm going to click on the this icon right here to make these trees brighter and i'm going to select the other icon and i'm going to click on the trees to make it darker and zoom in and click on brighter areas on the trees and as you can see it starts to hide in this background for us and it did a very good job so make sure to go back and fix the areas like this because as i said before there is no perfect way to cut these trees with the one click very quick so it's not boring to the viewer so now let's click on control i to inverse the selection and then let's select it and let's go back to lbg and then layers click two times on the background just to listerize it you don't always have to do that it's just in my case it was not so let's go and to select and mask and let's add the radius with the shift and the arrow keys to make the selection better let's add contrast to it try not to add a lot of contrast because we don't want these punches to uh vanish let's take down the radius just a little bit and yeah let's click ok and we have a selection of our trees again if you add the black background you will have this trees messed up messed up so select the brush with a white color and start painting these trees back just like that it's very quick you don't have to worry and if you go go out from and if you found out that you got out from the trees just click on x and paint these areas again it's very quick it will not take a lot of your time and it's worth it if you want your artwork to be more specific and yeah this is it for this tree oh yeah guys this was a more detailed breakdown of how i cut messy objects for my artworks i hope you learned something from this and remember guys my course will be ready within two months uh you will find out how i make artworks like this and this tutorial was just to get rid of the introduction so now if you know how to cut the objects i don't have to uh go back and explain these thin things on the curse so i just want to get this out of the way i'll still show you how i cut most of my objects that is not trees or models i will show you how to kite the landscape even though you can already get the idea of how i do that just by the color channels and all of that thank you so much for watching make sure to like and subscribe if you are new to the channel it will really support us and encourage us to make more videos so you guys i will see you in the next episodes and the next tutorials bye [Music] you

Channel: Photo Manipulation

Views: 7,345

Keywords: photoshop tutorial, learn photo editing, learn digital art, photomanipulation in photoshop cc, photo manipulation tutorial, photo manipulation tips, photoshop manipulation, Adobe Photoshop CC, what is select and mask, how do you use select and mask in photoshop, photoshop background removal tutorial, how to cut out people in photoshop, easy cut out photoshop, how to cut out trees in photoshop, how to cut out bushes in photoshop, how to cut out plants in photoshop

Id: k3s3DU7YgHk

Length: 25min 22sec (1522 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021