Use Simple Selection Tools to Replace a Sky in Photoshop! | Selections 01

selections are one of the most powerful tools in photoshop and in this three-part series we're going to teach you everything you need to know [Music] we're going over simple selection tools now don't let these fool you there's a lot you can do with these tools and in this example we're going to be cutting out mountains and adding a new sky into our image let's go ahead and jump in and get started so here we are in photoshop now you guys can download these sample images on phlearn for free just follow the link right down below so i'm going to go ahead and start by grabbing my move tool right up here at the top left and we're going to click and drag from one image to another that's just going to copy that from one image over here to the other you can see it's way too big i'm gonna hit controller command t and we're just gonna scale that down a little bit there we go something like that looks pretty good now i want these clouds to look like they're behind the mountains so i need to cut those mountains out let's go ahead and hit f for full screen i'm going to make that sky invisible for now and we need a great way to cut these mountains out but this is an intro to selection so we're going to start off by just generally explaining what selections do and going over some simple selection tools let's go ahead and create a new layer i'm going to do that by just by clicking right here on the new layer icon on the bottom right of our layer panel there we go now i'm going to grab my first simple selection tool this is the marquee tool clicking and dragging or clicking and holding on that will bring up a rectangular elliptical and then you have a single row or a single column i don't really use these two on the bottom very much we just want to focus on these two on the top so the rectangular and the elliptical let's go ahead and grab that rectangular marquee i can click and drag and you can see now i have a selection active when you have a selection active that basically means you can only edit the areas within that selection so let's go ahead and grab the brush tool i'm going to hit b for the brush tool it's going to sample this color i'm going to hold alt or option and sample this blue color and then i'm going to start painting on my image and you can see no matter where i paint it's only going to show up in that area so this is fundamentally what selections are for only affecting a certain area of your image now let's go ahead and show you how to manipulate and add and subtract and use these selections to a little bit greater degree so let's go ahead i'm going to just deselect by hitting control or command d or you can just go up here to select menu and go down to deselect there we go now that we don't have a selection check this out i can just paint wherever i want so if you want to restrict the area that you're editing to a certain area use a selection all right let's go ahead and hit undo i'm just going to go ahead and clear that area and now let's go over some of the tools within our rectangular and the elliptical marquee tool showing you how to add subtract and invert your selections so with the rectangular marquee tool i can simply click and drag and create a rectangle now if i want to create a square i'm going to hold shift so shift click and drag that's going to make a square now oftentimes when you're creating a selection you don't exactly know where to start it right like let's say i wanted to make a square selection right around these mountains maybe i didn't start off in the right place while you're making your selection go ahead and hold down space bar and you can move your selection while it's being created so with space bar and then i can let go of space bar go ahead and create the selection that i want and we're good to go now for instance if i were to click on my background layer and hit control or command j what that would do is it would take that area within the selection and copy it so by that selection we're able to copy that to a new area again control or command j is the keyboard shortcut for that let's hit undo a couple times we're back to our selection now let's say we want to add to this selection well i'm still going to use my rectangular marquee tool there we go i'm going to hold the shift key now and you can see my little cursor has a plus icon next to it that's going to allow me to add to this selection so if i hold shift there we go click and drag now i've selected multiple rectangles and they've added them together you can also use these icons right up here at the top to add subtract intersect okay if you want to hold alt or option you can subtract from your selection so if i hold alt or option click and drag this is going to subtract from my selection let's go ahead and do that again now this is a cool one if you hold shift and alt or option you'll get this little x that will actually create the intersection between two selections so if i select there intersection so shift is going to add to a selection as you can see alt or option is going to minus out from any selection and shift and alt or option is going to create the intersection between two areas that you've selected now you can do this with any selection tool so let's go ahead and start with a regular selection here with my marquee i'm going to go ahead and click here on my marquee selection tools we're going to go to the next tool the elliptical marquee tool basically does the same thing instead of a rectangle it's going to be an ellipse if you want to create a circle just hold down shift there we go so as i create this we're going to hold shift and i can actually add it to the rectangle that i had before alt or option i can click and hold this down if i hold shift as well while i'm doing this it's going to constrain it to a circle and i can minus that out there we go so you can see as we move along don't forget you can always hold spacebar to move around if you're like got a really beautiful part of your image that you like click on your background controller command j and then i could move that around copy it to another layer or let's say i could create a solid color fill layer behind it there we go i have a nice little vignette of an image so as you can see selections basically allow you to edit certain areas of your photos we've gone over the rectangular marquee tool the elliptical marquee tool now let's go ahead and start getting a little more practical we've done a couple examples with like duplicating the background mountains and we've shown you how to draw in just a certain area of your photo but in a more practical sense selections are used primarily to do things like cut objects out of their backgrounds so let's go ahead and start showing you how to do that now i'm here on my background layer once again let's go ahead and clean things up if you remember we brought in our sky at the beginning of this episode i'm on my background layer and what i want to do is start cutting out my mountains so let's go ahead and start we're going to use a few different tools to do this i'm going to start with my rectangular marquee tool so let's go ahead and make a rectangle selection i don't want the sky to be visible right so let's go ahead and say i want to cut out this sky using my rectangular marquee tool and as you can see it's not the best tool for the job because well the mountains aren't perfect rectangles but that's okay now i've made my selection up here at the top what i can do is click here on my layer mask icon on this layer and that's going to load my selection into a layer mask now a layer mask will either hide or show certain parts of your layer and if you have a selection active it's going to automatically load that selection directly into the layer mask so i have a selection active as you can see right here okay that rectangular marquee let's go ahead and click here on our layer mask icon there we go and as you can see now the area that i had selected is visible and everywhere else is invisible okay now let's take a look at the layer so we have our layer and then right next to it we have a layer mask so we can see with this layer mask that the top of it is white and the bottom of it is black so white areas on your layer mask will be visible black areas will be invisible if you want to invert to this you can hit control or command i and it's going to flip it around so let's try that controller command i it's going to invert and now our sky part of our sky is invisible and the mountains are visible all right let's go ahead and see what this is looking like i'm going to start pulling these two together and do we have a realistic composite just yet not really because as you can see we have a very well-defined line between the sky and the mountain so we need to continue to work on this all right so we've seen the rectangular marquee tool maybe not the best tool for the job okay the next tool we're going to look at is the elliptical marquee tool yes i could definitely just create a bunch of little ellipses here and then click on my layer mask and go to edit and down to fill and then fill that with black as we remember black make things invisible on our layer mask so i hit ok and yes that did make those areas invisible but this is still not the best tool for the job as we would have to just create a bunch of ellipses so we're gonna move on to our next tool and this is called our lasso tool now the lasso tool will actually allow you to draw selections on your images so let's go right over here this looks like a lasso like howdy cowboy we have three different lasso tools there's the regular lasso the polygonal lasso and the magnetic lasso we're going to go over all three of those right now so the regular lasso tool let's go ahead and zoom into our image this literally allows you to click and draw where you might want a selection to be active and this is actually a fantastic tool to use for these mountains because i can just draw right along the edge all right let's hold space bar down so i can move around my image let's go up around here and around the corner there i have a selection i know i didn't do the whole mountains because i want to show you multiple tools but i've done a pretty nice selection there in the mountains we're going to go to edit and then down to fill and we're going to fill this with black again we're filling it with black because i want to make my layer mask black in that area which is going to make the layer invisible so with layer masks white is visible and black is invisible so i've selected an area i want to fill it with black it's going to make it invisible revealing the sky that's underneath it let's hit ok there we go and we can see all right off to a cool start if i continue to do that along the entire mountain range we actually might be able to cut these mountains out in a pretty believable way so that tool might not be that bad the lasso tool might take a little bit of time but we could definitely cut out these mountains now what happens if you have something that's a little bit more straight edge because the one downside with the lasso tool is that like as you're creating a selection if you move let's say you're using a mouse or a cursor or a tablet as you move like the natural variations that your finger your hand might make it doesn't look very accurate it's kind of like jagged and in the case of this mountains that's not that bad of a thing really because mountains kind of have a jagged edge but let's say you wanted your edge to be a little bit straighter okay like if you're cutting out a building or a piece of architecture right then you would want to use the next tool located directly under the lasso tool this is called the polygonal lasso tool so l is your keyboard shortcut for the lasso tool and you can hit shift l to switch through all your lasso tools there we go so let's try this polygonal lasso tool in this case you click and then you have this little line you can click again and i have a little line again and each time i click it connects those two lines so you can see this tool works a little bit better it doesn't have that natural variation built in but if you're cutting out something that has well-defined edges that need to be straight edges this is a fantastic tool for the job i'm going to hit controller command minus a couple times to zoom out spacebar allows me to kind of move around my image and then let's go right up here to the very top and i'm just going to hit enter and it's going to close that selection down so you're going to be making a selection as long as you click and drag but once you hit enter you have your selection active so my selection is active looking pretty good let's try it again i'm on my layer mask we can see i have my layer and my layer mask by the way if i hold alt or option and click on my layer mask this is what my layer mask looks like okay we're a work in progress so let's go ahead and click on the layer mask you can see i have these white lines right around the mask that means the mask is selected so now again i want to fill this with black let's go to edit we're going to go down to fill and we're going to go down here to black there we go now i have a couple really cool shortcuts that i want to show you i'm with my regular polygonal lasso tool right now so i'm clicking and it's going to create straight lines but if while i'm using this tool i hold alt or option check this out it turns into the regular lasso tool if i let go of alt or option there we go i'm back to my polygonal lasso tool there we go so if you wanted to create some straight lines and then some curvy sections just hold alt or option and it's going to switch from the polygonal to the regular lasso tool it works the other way around with the regular lasso tool too so let's go ahead and grab our regular lasso tool which allows you to make curvy selections i'm going to hold alt or option there we go and now i'm using my polygonal lasso tool there we go let go of alt or option and i'm back to squiggles again this allows you to make very quick great selections over complicated backgrounds now the next selection tool we have is right under that and this is called the magnetic lasso tool now the magnetic lasso tool is actually incredibly cool because if you click on an area it's going to try to automatically find the edge of wherever you're going okay i'm not clicking here the tool is actually doing its best to find the edges and stick to them now if it creates some points that you don't like like you get stuck with this hit the delete or backspace key and it's going to simply delete some of your points and move backwards in time and say you can come down here and get a little bit closer i don't tend to use this tool that much it tends to be not like the most accurate but it can be really helpful especially if you're new to selections uh and you don't need a super accurate selection there we go hit enter to close that out it can work quite well so let's go ahead and go to edit and down to fill and we're going to fill this with black so you can see we're kind of inching our way along revealing the sky in the background all right now you might be asking yourself these tools are pretty cool but is there a faster way to do this right like the sky is relatively simple in this image can we make this selection a little bit faster so the answer is yes there are a lot of ways to do that we're moving on to our next tool which is going to be our magic wands tool that's nested with a few different tools so let's go ahead and click right next to it so we've got our marquee we've gone over the lasso tools now we're going to go over the magic wand tool and we're going to go over the quick selection tool the object selection tool just got a recent advance with ai and we're going to be going over that in our next episode because it's a little bit more advanced now so let's go ahead and try our magic wand tool now up here at the top you're going to see a lot of different options for all of our tools we have some options to se where it's going to sample for instance a point sample will just sample the current like the exact place that you click or we could do like a three by three or a five by five average which will include a little bit more information so let's go ahead and do a five by five average usually i leave it right there now the next tool we have right next to it is called tolerance this controls how much it's going to select close to where you actually click let's go ahead and keep this down really low for now we're just going to click on 10. now let's say i just click right here on the top of this mountain what it's going to do is it's going to select everywhere that's relatively similar to where i click okay i'll click here in the shadows it's going to click relatively similar areas you can see in this case it's selected quite a bit because that was similar to wherever i clicked so in this case clicking up in these areas it's selecting relatively similar areas but down here it kind of selected a little bit more because more was similar and it's going to go until it finds a boundary and then stop now if you wanted to select more let's hit controller command d to deselect again click here it only selects that much if i bring my tolerance up let's try 30 and i click about in the same place you're going to see it selects quite a bit more if i drag my tolerance up to 50 control or command d to deselect and click here again it's going to select even more so if you find you need to select more or less change your tolerance to do that now there's also a really cool option right here that says contiguous now this is going to be checked by default meaning it's going to go until it finds a pixel that looks super different and then stop if you uncheck contiguous let's go ahead and click here now it's going to look everywhere in your image that's relatively similar see found these mountains over here and found these mountains over here with a similar color range and it selected those as well okay now let's go ahead and zoom out if i check contiguous back on and click right here you're going to see it's going to stop right there not select anything else if i uncheck contiguous and then go ahead and click here there we go it's going to select everything that's relatively similar and of course you can sample all layers here as well if you have a very complicated image that might be helpful i'm going to just leave contiguous on for now now in this case we're looking really good we found that the magic wand tool can basically select areas that are similar to wherever we clicked now the sky in this original image was relatively plain it was relatively similar pretty much all around so let's go ahead and reveal our sky to see about making that a selection let's start by holding shift and clicking on the layer mask for this layer it completely reveals the sky and now you can see yeah we should be able to make a selection of this entire sky pretty quickly because it all pretty much looks the same already so let's go ahead and start this off i'm going to just keep all of these settings our sample size is going to be a five by five average we're going to set our tolerance to 50 and then we're going to have contiguous checked so i'm going to go ahead and just click right here at the top and see like okay cool yes it's selected the sky but it's selected too much so we're gonna bring our tolerance down so it selects less so let's go ahead and try our tolerance we're gonna go down to 20 controller command d to deselect and then click again and you can see ah much better we've selected the sky okay all the way up to the edge of the mountains i'm going to hold shift just like we learned earlier shift will add to the selection there we go let's go ahead and click there click up there in the corner it's still adding kind of like a little bit too much you can see it's starting to select down there in the mountains now i can lower the tolerance let's try maybe u15 deselect by hitting control or command d and we're just going to continue to shift click and add to the selections there we go and we're looking pretty good now in this case you're going to see maybe it didn't do the best job so we have a few different options we can choose we can lower our tolerance again if we want to do that and you can do that on the fly i can hit controller command z a couple times i can type in a tolerance of 10 and then shift click here there we go it seems like it's doing a much better or i can just load up different selection tools and that's the beauty with selections in photoshop is you can use any selection tool at any time so we're going to take a look at this and we're like okay cool pretty good like we don't have the top right selected perfectly and these mountains don't look perfect but i know how to fix these now let's go ahead and grab one of our other tools the lasso tool and simply add or subtract to this selection so here we are our lasso tool is going to allow me to just draw my selection in now i want to minus this area of the mountains from my selection right because i don't want it selected really i just want the sky selected so we're going to hold alt or option and then click and drag over this area here there we go let go and then minus that area out of the selection now let's say maybe i don't want those background mountains selected just these foreground mountains we're going to hold shift and i'm going to be able to simply add to this selection by drawing up at the top so i can use any selection tool at any time to add subtract or intersect from my selections there we go and that's looking pretty good all right let's hold shift and i added to that selection i meant to minus out so hold alt or option right there now up here at the very top right maybe i want to use my marquee tool so let's go ahead back over here to our marquee tool we're going to go to our rectangular marquee there we go i'ma hold shift that's gonna add to my selection and click and drag here and there we go all right down here at the bottom again i might wanna go to my lasso tool hold shift and just kind of straighten that out a little bit perfect so as we can see here we're looking pretty good hold shift add to that selection with the lasso tool up there all right now remember earlier we already created a layer mask i disabled the layer mask temporarily that's why it has this red x by holding shift and clicking on that layer mask i can re-enable the layer mask by holding shift and clicking on the layer mask again so let's do that shift click on the layer mask it now re-enables the layer mask okay we can see i've already cut out a decent bit of the sky but now i have a great selection so i can continue my cutout so all we have to do we're clicked on the layer mask again make sure that this little white boundary is on your layer mask okay if you click on your layer the white boundary is going to be on your layer if you click on your mask the white boundary will be on your mask that allows you to edit the mask itself so all we have to do now is fill this with black so we're going to go to edit and down to fill and we're going to choose to fill it with black hit okay and there we go control or command d to deselect and check that out now we have our background where i can move this up and down and find where it looks pretty good well i think we're off to a great start and these are our simple selection tools within photoshop let's go ahead and zoom in we're going to tackle one more little thing that we just want to edit a little bit as you can see the edge here just looks a little bit jagged right what happens if you want to smooth out your edge just a little bit and maybe shrink it a little bit well let's go ahead and find our place that doesn't look that great right over here we're going to click on our layer mask most of the time after making selections you'll want to refine the edge of them just really nice and subtly so click on that layer mask we're going to go to select and then down here to select and mask this is going to make that edge just a little bit better so select and mask there we go now here in my global refinements here on the very right hand side you have different options for your view right here i want to go ahead and click on on layers that's going to show me what it actually looks like on my image so on layers and then i can do some things like adding feathering to the edge of my selection there we go i can shift my edge in or out and i can add some contrast back as well so i just want to find something that kind of looks like the background again with too much contrast it tends to look a little bit fake but there we go we can see just a little bit of uh work here and we're starting to get a much cleaner edge so let's go ahead and click on this show original doesn't really look that great as you can see there we go that's after a very quick selected mask hit ok and we are good to go so we just did a sky replacement using simple selection tools in photoshop and there we go we did a sky replacement using simple selection tools in photoshop thanks so much for watching in our next video in the series we're going over more advanced selection tools including how to use ai and automatically cutting out your subject it's gonna be incredibly cool click on that subscribe button click on that bell notification if you want to get more free photoshop tutorials every single week thanks again and i'll learn you later bye everyone [Music] you

Channel: PHLEARN

Views: 7,305

Keywords: selection photoshop, replace sky in photoshop, swap out the sky, select sky in photoshop 2021, select sky in photoshop 2020, select sky in photoshop, what are selections in photoshop, selection tools photoshop, how to select something in photoshop, how to make selections in photoshop, how to create selections in photoshop, selections in photoshop 2021, best way to make selections in photoshop, how to make better selections in photoshop

Id: BvIztNvHNus

Length: 23min 56sec (1436 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 14 2021