Photoshop's 5 Most Powerful Selection Tools

today i'm going to show you my five most powerful selection tools in photoshop hey there and welcome to phlearn my name is aaron nace you can find me on phlearn.com where we make learning fun you're joining me and my special assistant koa in the background now selections basically allow you to edit certain parts of your image maybe you want to change a specific color or you can even use them to cut your subjects out of their backgrounds now there are a host of regular selection tools like the marquee tools and the lasso tool and the quick select those are fantastic for quick jobs but in this tutorial we're going over more advanced selection tools that are going to help you make more accurate selections so our first tool is called select subject it's a fantastic addition to photoshop basically it uses ai to identify your subject and allows you to cut them out with a click of a button so here's our first sample image we're going to go up to select and then down to select subject and you can see there aren't any options built into this tool but by and large it does a very good job now you can see it in fact has created a selection around our subject the only slight like thing about the automatic tools is sometimes they get a little bit confused in this case it thought some of the background was part of our subject but that's really not that big of a deal if i click on my layer mask icon i can go ahead and cut my subject out and then i'm going to use a simple tool like our lasso tool to just make some selections so we'll just go around create that selection there i'm going to hold shift and go ahead and include these areas there we go right down there and then on my layer mask i'm going to go to edit we're going to go down to fill and i'm going to fill this with black making it invisible and then there we go very quickly we have our subject completely cut out and on a blank background our next selection tool is called select color range this is perfect if you want to identify a certain color and then change that color let's go ahead and show you how it works so here in photoshop i want to change the color of her eye makeup so what we're going to do is go to select and then down to select color range now you have a little eyedropper tool let's move this right over here you have an eyedropper tool that you can select on different colors you have a couple options down here on the bottom of how you'd like to see your preview you can see it on grayscale the lighter areas get selected and the darker areas don't okay or you can see like a black matte or a white matte i think this quick mask view is really nice so in this case i want to click right here on her eyes and you can see in fact that her eyes become selected and nothing else does because it's the color blue and we're selecting based on a color range now the next option here is to choose your fuzziness this is going to allow you to include more of your image or less let's go ahead down to our selection preview and go to grayscale so we can see how this works so if i select less you're going to see it's just the colors that i clicked on as i go to more it's going to include more and more colors because you can actually see there's a little bit of blue in her hair if i just go back to the original you can see there is in fact some blue in her hair as well now let's say we go ahead and lower that down just a little bit but we want to include a couple more colors you can use the plus eyedropper tool here to simply click on your image and include more colors and then in this case i might just bring my fuzziness down a little bit and you can see it's doing a fantastic job selecting that color range so let's go ahead and hit ok and as you can see it turns those colors into a selection now i'm just going to go to my adjustment layers i'm just going to go to a hue slash saturation adjustment layer and because that selection was active it automatically loads it into the layer mask of my hue saturation adjustment layer so all i have to do here if i want to change that color is simply go left or right on this hue slider and you can see very quickly and easily it's changing that color which is incredibly fun and super quick our next selection tool is perfect when you need to select fine detailed areas like a person's hair in this case we're going to use this to cut out our subject so let's go up here to select and we're going to go down to select and mask now here on the right hand side i'm going to choose my view we're going to go to overlay we're going to start off with our tool on the very top left which just allows us to paint the area we want to turn into the selection you can see i'm just clicking on here on the background as i paint there it just kind of learns what you want selected and what you don't this quick mask view i find right over here this overlay is actually the best way of working with this tool now as i said earlier this tool is fantastic for cutting out fine details like hair so let's go ahead and zoom in here and we're going to use the refine edge tool so right over here this allows you to simply refine your edge so let's make this a little bit smaller and i'm going to simply paint right over here and it's going to figure out that i don't want that included in my selection okay now this little area of hair that i do want selected here's the deal you start inside of the selection and then paint out and look at that it becomes red meaning that it's now part of that selection let's hold spacebar and click and drag down so we can move our canvas and now i want to refine these earrings a little bit you can see it did an okay job here but it didn't make these a selection so you simply paint over with the refine edge tool there we go and it figures out what you want in your selection and what you don't want so you are pretty much defining it here but it does most of the work for you let's go over here and do the same thing with this area there we go fantastic and we'll go over here and do the same thing here saying hey i don't want this as a part of my selection simply paint over it and you're good to go there we go let's go ahead and add the hair fantastic this is an incredibly easy tool to use there we go let's go ahead and add this hair as well so it seems to know what should and should not be visible in your image now if you ever need to just do a little bit more of an accurate painting like if it doesn't get the job done perfectly next you move on to the third tool list and this tool will actually allow you to just simply paint in your selection so you can hold alt or option to minus the selection out which is what i'm doing right now or you can just paint regularly and that will allow you to just paint your regular selection so basically this is similar to using the brush tool where i'm just basically painting this area in and once i'm done with this tool it's going to convert it into a selection so you can see here on these very difficult areas like hair i'm just simply able to define exactly what i do and do not want to be visible there we go you can use the opening close brackets on your computer to make your brush larger and smaller here we go so here we have a little area with hair or the ear rather that wasn't perfect there we go and we can make this into a selection now keep in mind what we're going to wind up doing with this selection is turning it into a layer mask so if it's not absolutely perfect from this tool it's okay because we can always work on our layer mask that looks great so here are my output settings we can see right over let's just scroll right down okay my output settings i can output this to a layer mask i could do a new layer with a layer mask or just a selection in this case let's choose layer mask so let's hit ok there and we can see we have a layer mask it's actually the opposite of what we want so we're going to click on our layer mask and hit controller command i to invert this and we can see what a really nice job it does especially with fine detailed areas like hair remember we made this as a part of the selection and it looks fantastic now earlier we said it's just a layer mask so if it doesn't include something you want no big deal well in this case it didn't do the earrings but again we can change a layer mask at any time so i'm going to hold shift and then click on my layer mask which just temporarily disables that layer mask okay then let's try using a tool that from our last section i'm going to use select color range because i want to select these earrings they're dark on a white background select color range is going to work really well so let's go to select and then down to select color range there we go let's go ahead and click on these earrings and i'm just going to bring up my fuzziness fantastic we'll keep on going because i want more of those earrings selected and hit ok now that we have our selection from those earrings i can simply paint white on my layer mask and it'll make it visible so let's hit b for the brush tool and make sure white is my foreground color and we're just going to simply paint back those earrings alright so there we have it we can even get the little bit of hair right there as well perfect and now we have a perfectly cut out subject now don't forget if you want to follow along you can actually download all of these sample images on phlearn.com just follow the link right down below our next tool is called the pen tool it allows you to trace over any object in photoshop and then turn that into a selection this is great when some of these automatic tools don't work that well for instance we have our image here now let's say i want to select out this iphone and i want to make a perfect selection out of it okay select and then down to select color range well i could click on the phone bring my fuzziness down lower a little bit but i'm still not going to have a perfect selection you're going to see it's going to get the shadow it's gonna really take a lot of cleanup work to get that to look good all right well you can try select and then select subject and you can see it's mostly looking for people and it did an okay job here but as you can see down here this is what my selection is going to look like and if i was doing like a product for a website or something like that i would still have to completely redo this selection because it just doesn't look that good so this is a photograph that's relatively difficult to cut out just the phone but that's where the pen tool shines so now let's go ahead and show you how to use the pen tool to trace around your object and there are a couple of settings that i prefer up here at the very top you want to make sure you're set to path with your pen tool and then i like this setting called rubber band this will allow you to actually see what you're doing and i like to bring my thickness to three pixels it just helps you visualize a little bit better how the pen tool works okay so what we're going to do is we're going to start here on the bottom left corner i'm going to click once there and then because i have rubber band enabled i can get a preview of where my next point is going to be now this is just going to be a straight line so i can go ahead and zoom out here and go all the way to the edge of the straight line which is about here now at this point i want to do a curve so instead of just clicking i'm going to click and drag so let's click and drag and there you can see i'm able to create that perfect curve okay now here i'm just going to click because i want a straight line and then here i want to click and drag because i want a curved line so let's just click and drag and this gives us a curved line there we go beautiful now in this case i want this area to be a little bit shorter so i'm going to hold alt or option and take my little point bring it over here so i can click there and then i can even go around this button you can see i can include a curve right around that button and get as detailed as i am on a smaller scale and believe it or not you can actually use this tool to select and cut out an entire subject there we go let's go ahead and bring that down there let's see click and drag whenever you want to make a curve there we go just click if you want to make a straight line and for a curve you want to click and drag again if you want to change direction hold alt or option grab that little point and bring it in the direction that you want to go it looks like there's another button right there i only remember two buttons on an iphone but maybe they've added a couple i don't know anyway we're gonna cut it out alt or option to change directions and then we're gonna bring that down way over here next i don't get confused by this shadow even though visually it's kind of hard to see it because it just looks like the same color as the shadow that's why those automatic tools get confused but this is why the pen tool works because you can choose those points okay let's go ahead and bring it right over here i'm going to click and then we got our last point here i'm going to click and drag to close this out there we go now my other favorite thing about the pen tool is that you can move these points at any time let's say you didn't like where you what you did with this point you can hold control or command and click on it there we go and when i click on it you can see i can move it around at any time so i can simply move it and say oh you know what i like that a little better and you're good to go so now that we have an accurate path around the cell phone it's very easy to turn into a selection and then cut out all we have to do is make sure you're still selected on the pen tool we're going to right click and we're going to go to make selection now you can make the edge a little bit softer by feathering the radius in this case we want a hard edge so i'm going to hit 0. let's hit ok there and you can see we have a perfect selection and if i click on my layer mask you can see the phone is now perfectly cut out including those buttons and for instance if i wanted to put it on a solid color background let's just go with light blue and put that under our phone you can see we have a perfectly well defined edge around the entire phone exactly where the edge of the phone actually is looking good our last tool for creating advanced selections is called channels now when we use the pen tool we talked about how it's really good for something that has a hard edge like an iphone channels are really good when something has a soft edge like hair or clouds so in this example we're going to cut some clouds out of the background and put them behind our subject so we have two images here now again you guys can download all of these images on phlearn.com just click on the link right down below so i want to cut these clouds out of the background let's hit f for full screen we'll go ahead and zoom in and we're going to go to window and down to channels now let's go ahead and take a look at when i click on these color channels if i click on my red channel you can see the sky gets really dark and the clouds are white the reason is because there's not a lot of red in the sky it's mostly blue now green is kind of in the middle and blue is very light because there's a lot of blue in the sky so it's representing color and light value with black and white so what you want to do is basically choose whatever has the most contrast so my goal is to cut those clouds out so i want the sky to be as dark as possible and the clouds to be as light as possible so what we're going to do is go to our red channel where we have a huge amount of contrast i'm going to go ahead and duplicate this by clicking and dragging it to the new channel icon it's actually super important to duplicate it if you don't you can actually mess up your original image so always duplicate it now we're going to use levels to enhance this contrast a little bit let's hit controller command l for our levels and i'm just going to make my darks a little bit darker there we are now to turn this channel into a selection basically it's just going to select the lighter area and whatever's dark does not get selected super easy to do simply hold ctrl or command and click here right on the channel and you can see it becomes a selection so now let's go back to our layers i'm going to create a new layer and i'm going to fill this with white because clouds are white so we're going to go to edit we're going to go down to fill and i'm going to choose my color as white there we go now what we have to do is deselect and then copy these clouds from one image to another so let's hit controller command d to turn off our selection also known as deselect we're gonna go ahead and just copy this from one image to another so i'm gonna use my move tool we're gonna click and drag from one image to another and there we go let's hit f for full screen and i'm just going to make this a little bit bigger so controller command t and here we can see i'm going to able to make this a bit bigger i'm going to right click and go to flip vertical and there we go we have really cool clouds around this image i think that looks really great now you can see they're slightly in front of the subject that's not a big deal because we know how to cut our subject out using select subject so let's make that invisible click on our background we'll go to select and then we're just going to go to select subject it does a great job and now that select subject is in fact selected our subject instead of putting that on the layer mask for this layer i'm going to put it as a layer mask for my cloud layer so let's click on the layer mask for the cloud layer if a layer mask ever does the opposite of what you want in this case the clouds are only visible where my subject is just click on your layer mask and hit controller command i to invert it okay so now i can unlink the layer and the layer mask and check this out i can move these clouds anywhere i want to and they're going to stay behind my subject you can see they're not going to be in front of my subject at all because i used select subject to cut my subject out and now we're just simply moving these clouds around and adding them to the picture and there we have our five most powerful selection tools in photoshop thank you so much for watching if you want to see more of me and occasionally my guest star mr koa hit that subscribe button we'll send you a free tutorial every single week thanks again i'll learn you later bye everyone

Channel: PHLEARN

Views: 85,021

Keywords: Phlearn, Photography, Aaron Nace, Photoshop, Adobe, Tutorial, Tips, How-to, Adobe Photoshop, Course, Learn Photoshop, how to make selections, photoshop selections, select and mask photoshop, how to cut out anything in photoshop, how to cut anything out in photoshop, photoshop make a selection, select subject, selections in photoshop, remove background, how to make selections in photoshop, how to make selections with the pen tool, photoshop selections tutorial, select and mask

Id: lbXd_CaH1Ws

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021