How to Use the Select and Mask Workspace in Photoshop

hey there and welcome to phlearn my name is aaron nace you can find me at phlearn.com where we make learning fun in today's video we're going to show you the amazing power of the select and mask dialogue you can cut out your subject and refine the edge all in one place [Music] so here's our sample image for today we want to get our subject cut out really easy to do go ahead and click on your background layer we're going to go to select and then down to select and mask let's go ahead and click there now by default i don't really see anything i need to click on this select subject button right up here at the top so let's go ahead and click on select subject and you can see yeah pretty good already now we're going to have to zoom in and take a look at different parts of our image where maybe it didn't do the perfect job no big deal so let's go ahead and give you a tour of this entire dialogue and show you how everything works so we're going to start off here on the properties in the very top right you have a few different views you can look at you can see the onion skin which will be your image basically with the background on it you can see marching ants some dots overlay on black on white now these are not changing the selection itself this just changes how you see the selection so we're going to keep this on onion skin to start with i find this to be really helpful and you can just adjust your opacity to see the image versus the background so as i change my transparency here it gives me a really good preview of what the image actually looks like now over here on the left hand side these are where your tools actually help you refine your edges so this first tool will allow you to include or disclude any areas of your image so let's go ahead and start there i'm going to click on this tool now with all of these tools here on the left you have the ability to add or subtract from your edges so in this case i'm just going to go to this subtract icon here and i'm going to paint right over here where this little area is in the background and it just knows to reverse or remove that from my selection so as i change my transparency you can see yep it is in fact removed from that now this tool is smart in that it will actually just figure out where we want to remove for instance if i paint over this area here it'll just completely remove all of that area near there so i can just simply click right here and it'll remove that area here click here on these different colors and it's going to remove everything relatively similar there we go i can just click on this light area and you can see it does a pretty good job refining all those edges we're going to go over here to this blue and just say hey we don't need to include the blue so you can see it's not only where i click it's actually like getting information from around that image and basically saying okay cool you don't want that blue to be visible you don't want that orange to be visible cool we'll just go ahead and get rid of all that blue in that area or all the orange in that area there we go and that's looking pretty good now we're going to start to just move around our image and change our transparency to see how we're looking you can see we might need to do a little bit of cleanup here around the edge but that's okay we're going to show you how to do that in just a second with our next tool to start off with i just want to get a good sense of hey are we including or not including some of these important areas let's go ahead and add to our selection around the shirt area here we just want to make sure that it does include this shirt detail there we go and move down here let's go ahead and hit this minus icon and remove some of this area between our subject's fingers and you can see again this tool is relatively smart it does a lot of the work for you you don't really have to do much here if it jumps too much in this case it removed his entire hands you can just hit this plus icon and then go ahead and add you just see painting right in over there on top of the fingers and it'll figure it out it'll say okay cool you want those fingers in this selection cool we'll go ahead and put them back for you so oftentimes it's not a huge deal if you don't get it perfectly right and there are a lot of different ways to refine this within the same tool let's go ahead and move around i just want to get the big areas here this area we want to remove so let's go ahead and use this minus icon and remove that and you can see pretty quickly and pretty easily all right let's do minus this out too there we go now we do have some cases where it just might not do the exact thing you want it to do and that is where the next tool comes down we're actually going to skip one but we're going to go to this tool the third down from the top and this will simply allow you to add or remove to your selections completely manually okay so this is basically wherever i paint is going to be included in my selection all right so this is not going to try to do any type of refinement this is simply going to just add or remove anything that i want from my selection so i'm just basically painting my selection at this point really nice and easy so you have a few different options whether you want to just you know simply paint to remove from your selection you can do that or if you want to do some type of edge refinement you can do that as well all right let's go ahead and bring this back up maybe i want to say hey let's go ahead and include this by the way you can switch between your add and remove by holding alt or option so in this case i'm going to hold alt or option to add and we're just going to make sure we have a nice edge of our shirt there we go that looks pretty good go ahead and scroll up there and make sure the edge of our shirt looks good so we can see these automatic tools like select mask they do a great job by default but oftentimes we have to just kind of come in and help them out a little bit and that's totally okay there we go after all we know what's our subject you know we know the best thing we just got to guide the software just a little bit sometimes all right up here at the top let's see the transparency we have our little area here this is actually part of the hat so we're going to go to our next tool on the list and this is actually our lasso tool so let's go to our lasso tool and i'm just going to use the plus lasso there we go you can hold alt or option to make it a minus but i'm just going to go ahead and tell it hey let's include this in our selection too there we go double click and you've added that to your selection so you have all these different selection tools that will allow you to add or remove areas from your entire selection all right now at this point i feel like hey we're looking pretty good maybe this area not so great so let's go ahead and minus this out we're going to hold alt or option which allows us to minus this area out here we go we're just going to click there now i think that clicking a few times with this polygonal lasso tool is a really good way to create edges in this tool there we go hit enter and you're going to go ahead and remove remove that so now we have a nice edge all the way up to there let's go ahead and bring our transparency all the way up and here we can do a little bit more refinement so we're going to go to our refine edge tool which is the second tool on the very bottom and i'm just going to go ahead and say let's refine this edge a little bit okay it's going to look for similar colors to wherever we're painting and it's going to make sure to include those colors in the edge and remove colors that don't exactly fit okay so anytime you have an edge that just doesn't look that great this refine edge tool is the way to go and you can see these edges are a little bit weird so that's why we're going in with the refine edge tool there we go now it's important to keep in mind you can always add to your selection with this third tool from the very top there we go and this is just a hard add okay you can right click here and change the hardness of that brush there we go and i can just simply add by painting in that finger there so we're not really having to use many crazy uh selection tools notice i'm not using anything like the pen tool here i'm literally just painting in these fingers now i also want to remind you guys that all of the things that i'm doing here this is all just going to go to a layer mask and you can refine that layer mask at any time if you want to so if you don't get it perfect from right here don't worry about it it's really not that big of a deal you're always going to have your layer mask that you can go in and refine at any point in time there we go that's looking pretty good and we're just going to continue to scroll around our subject and at this point i think we're looking great all right all the way up to the hat this looks good we have a couple little areas here that i want to refine so i recommend getting the majority of your subject cut out and looking good and then go ahead and click on refine hair so everything looks really good all around except we have a couple areas on our subject's hair that doesn't look good luckily there's a tool that's built in that's going to handle exactly this it's called refine hair we're going to go up here to the very top where we see refined hair and i'm just going to click on refine hair and look what that did amazing right just the before and after basically did all the work for me on cutting out my subject's hair absolutely incredible and all in all looking really good sometimes that tool gets a little bit confused the refined hair as you can see if i adjust my transparency it went and it kind of thought the shirt was part of the hair uh that's totally okay still in the same tool you can just go in here with the third tool from the top there we go and i can just say hey you know what this is actually supposed to be part of our selection so let's go ahead and paint that in and say no this is not hair we do want this to be part of our selection and there we go let's go ahead and paint this in and make sure that's visible there fantastic so as you can see you can pretty much do all of your selections and all of your layer masking within this one tool all right that looks really good and let's go ahead and bring our opacity back up and make sure we got everywhere we wanted to get now you can get back to this select and mask dialog at any time by the way so if you don't do exactly what you want no big deal you can come back here and refine your mask at any point in time all right all in all i think this looks great now sometimes you'll run into the case where your edge is just maybe a little bit too well defined like the edge is very sharp that's where you can go in here to your edge detection you can change your edge detection and it's going to kind of like change the radius of where it looks for for your edges especially if it's not cutting the hair out perfectly you'll want to increase the radius for your edge detection so let's go up to the hair and show you what this does when we increase the radius for the hair there we go and bring it back down it actually looks better lower in this case our global refinements here's where we can actually add some smoothing to the edge let's take a look at this edge here we can add some feathering which softens the edge up a little bit and then add some contrast which is going to make that a nice firm edge and then you can shift your edge in or out if you have any feathering or any fringing in your image sometimes when you cut someone out let's say they're on a light colored background you'll see like a really light border just a thin border around your subject that's where shifting your edge in just a little bit can come in handy but i do want to say that if you shift your edge in and out it will affect your hair okay so we're just going to bring all that back to zero and that's going to make sure that the hair looks a little bit better you can do this in multiple stages sometimes what i'll do is i'll make one selected mask just for the hair and then i'll do one for the body that way i can get a nice smooth selection bring the edge in a little bit and then i can refine the hair later all you have to do is go back in the tool and hit refine hair again you're good to go now let's go ahead and close that down last part if they are on a complicated background and you want to put them let's say on a pure white background decontaminate colors can be helpful basically what this will do is it's going to extend out the colors of your subject so let's just show you what this does if i bring my transparency down so decontaminate colors here you can see it's kind of just extending the colors of my subject's hair for instance like it's making more of the selection black it's actually changing the image itself changing it to include more black areas around the hair and this is going to help you with fringing around hair like if the hair looks like it's got white edges um because it's bringing in some of the background or in this case some blue edges blue edges decontaminate colors can work really well but if you're not having that in issue i recommend keeping this unchecked all right and then last here at the bottom we can output this to whatever we want in this case i'm just going to output this to a layer mask on my current layer because on my background layer all right let's go ahead and hit ok and see what this looks like it's basically exactly what we just saw in the onion skin of our image i'm going to go ahead and create a solid color fill layer here let's just go all the way to white and put that right behind our subject and we can see our subject is very well cut out on a white background remember a couple little areas that it didn't get exactly right that's not a big deal we just click right here on our layer mask go back down to select and select and mask and we just do it again let's bring our transparency all the way up here and then we want to use the third tool from the top hold alt or option and i'm just going to minus this out okay now you can do this by painting black on your layer mask directly so if you don't want to come back into this tool that's totally okay but if this tool makes sense for you and you're like cool select and mask i'm just going to use that from now on you can do all of your selecting in all of your layer masking right here in this one tool so we're just going to kind of come in here i'm able to refine this edge because the edge doesn't look that great so we're going to go to the refine edge tool which is the second from the top there we go and we're just going to kind of paint this in a little bit make sure that looks a little bit better there we go it's looking really really nice let's go up here to the hair make sure we refine the edge around the hair so you can see how we did our first round and then when we need to make a couple little changes it's not a big deal at all to come back and work on this again so select and mask you can continue to use over and over it's not like you've got to get it perfect and then be done with it there we go let's go ahead and just minus a couple of these areas out this is a little bit there we go a little bit weird right there fantastic obviously there are a ton of advanced tools and techniques for cutting out things like hair uh we actually have tutorials on phlearn just for cutting out hair we'll link to those in the description right down below because hair is relatively tricky but in terms of a pretty quick job this tool does a great job now let's go ahead and take a look right here where it says decontaminate colors let's see what that does so if we hit decontaminate colors you can see it just gets rid of like the blue and the orange fringing around here so if i uncheck that you can still see the orange and the blue it basically takes the colors of the selection and extends them out a little bit okay so let's go ahead and refine this edge a little bit here there we go and with this decontaminate colors it's just going to make black hair there all right let's refine this edge here a little bit more too just with my refine edge tool second from the top it's going to process this again and then re run decontaminate colors it's not perfect here but that's okay we're just going to output this to a new layer with the layer mask that looks okay and then if i hold alt or option and take a look at my layer mask this is what the layer mask looks like with the hair all we have to do here is hit b for the brush tool we're just going to paint black on my layer mask we're going to change our mode to overlay okay and this is just going to remove those lighter areas there we go i'm changing the mode of my brush tool okay to overlay and this is just going to help remove some of those background elements and only have my hair show up there we go perfect so just a little bit and then let's just change that right back to normal there we go we're just going to paint with white make sure things like our glasses are fully visible fantastic and overall i gotta say pretty happy with that layer mask from top all the way to bottom let's take a look at this and we can see the fringing has been removed from our hair if you need to come back in here a little bit more overlay there we go just paint black right over there it's going to remove any type of that background that's still a little bit visible and there we go let's go ahead and hit shift there's our before image well you can see because we hit that decontaminate colors this is literally what it does it'll extend the colors of your image but it can make for a nicer cutout let's take a look at our overall before and after so the next time you need to cut out your subject go to select and mask hit select subject go ahead and do your little refinements hit refine hair at the end and don't forget you can always get back in there and change your layer mask at any time this is non-destructive editing it's going to help you cut out your subjects in photoshop you can get this sample image and this psd for free on phlearn.com just follow the link right down below thanks again i'll learn you later bye everyone i'm sweating here because it is hot in puerto vallarta it is so hot in puerto vallarta literally everyone told me you would be hot here and they were right it is in fact hot in puerto vallarta [Music] [Music] you

Channel: PHLEARN

Views: 24,239

Keywords: select and mask, how to cut out anything in photoshop, photoshop tutorial, adobe photoshop, select and mask hair, how to cut out hair, cut out image, photoshop cut outs, photoshop select and mask, select and mask workspace, how to remove background in photoshop, layer mask, aaron nace, learn photoshop, select and mask in photoshop, photoshop cut out hair, refine edge, remove background, layer mask to remove background in photoshop, delete background, refine mask

Id: vUqP4WJ-vTc

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 06 2021