How to Use Selections in Photoshop
Intro
What’s up Photoshop fam? Welcome back to the Pixel Laundry Photoshop Academy, I’m Rick Navarro. I’m going to be teaching you guys today about how to use selections in Photoshop. We’re going to learn today how to use them, when to use them and what technique to use, when you do use them stick around. What’s up Photoshop fam? I’m Rick Navarro and this is the Pixel Laundry Photoshop Academy.
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Selections
These selections are one of these single most important things you’re going to use in Photoshop. You literally use them for almost everything. Selections are exactly what they sound like. You use selections to make a selection, basically you are going to be telling Photoshop with your selection tools what part of the image you want to work on to apply, a technique to or to manipulate Okay? So let’s go ahead and dive right in. In the last lesson, in lesson 1, we went over your workspace and where everything is by now you should have a familiarity with how the workspace works and how you can manipulate it to customize or create a customized workspace for your workflow. This is my workspace. Here yours might look a little bit something like this when you open it up for the first time. I’ve created a custom workspace specifically for my YouTube tutorials or my Photoshop education class tutorials and it looks like this and what we’re going to be focusing on today are these first four tools in some of the older versions these tools were divided by a small dividing line in between them. They’re in clusters and they have put them like that specifically because they relate to each other.
Four Tools – Move, Marquee, Lasso, Object Selection
So these first four tools, all have to do with selections in the first lesson. We didn’t go over the specifics of each tool because I’m going to go over them as we use them so that you know how to use them appropriately as opposed to giving you all the definitions at one time and then you forgetting them when you go to work. As I mentioned these are your selection tools, the first one here is your move tool, the second one here is your marquee tool, this third one is your lasso tool, this fourth one is your object selection, your quick selection or your magic one tool and each of these do different things based off of different parameters in Photoshop. So this is your background layer, whenever you’re working in Photoshop, it’s a good idea to duplicate this background so that you always have a source reference to go back to this is true in retouching, this is true in design. You never want to manipulate or work in a way that we know in the industry as destructively, you never want to destroy or create layer minute edits on your original image because if you mess up or the machine crashes or you don’t have a copy of that image again you’re going to not have anything to go back to. So get in the habit right off the bat of using a duplicate layer. We’re going to talk about layers in a different lesson but I just want you to begin to familiarize yourself with the layer palette first and foremost. But then know that we’ll come back to it later on in another lesson and go deeper into how the layer’s palette works.
Duplicate Layer
Okay for right now the quickest way to duplicate your layer is a couple ways actually I should say you can grab this layer and drag it into this little plus button right here and that will copy your layer or what you can use is a hot key and this is my favorite way to do it. I’m going to hold down command on the Apple or the Mac computer and hit J, it’s probably CTRL if you’re on a PC and hit J and that’s going to duplicate that layer for you. Okay so first and foremost make a duplicate layer.
Move Tool
The next thing I want to show you is this first tool and this is called the move tool. Hotkey for the move tool is V, the move tool does what it says it moves your objects. If I go back to a full-screen view here, you can see that I’m grabbing the layer and it’s moving it now, if I was to turn on this bottom layer. Now you can see that I’m grabbing this entire image as an object and moving it around. One thing to note here is you want to make sure that you’re on the correct layer. A lot of times especially in the beginning you may put your cursor on the image where you think you’re grabbing and try to move it, you’re going to get this warning, could not use the move tool because the layer is locked. By default, your background layer always comes locked. If you’re working on several layers or if for some reason your layer has been unlocked, you may be trying to select this top layer but for some reason it’s grabbing the bottom one. If that ever happens know that you’re on the incorrect layer. So you want to check your layer’s palette, if your layer’s palette is an open go to window and open up your layers right here, layers hotkey for that as F7 but if you don’t have function keys because you’re working on a new Mac and they’ve taken away your function keys or they’ve buried them, you’ll know that it’s here in the window. I’m going to go ahead and re-lock that layer and turn it off because like I mentioned, you always want to have an original layer to go back in reference. Now that I’ve made my duplicate, let’s just go ahead and duplicate this layer again because it’s going to put it right back in the center for me. Let’s go ahead and look at this bathing suit if I wanted to make a selection on this bathing suit, you have a few ways to do this okay and that kind of brings us to our next set of tools.
Marquee Tool
Now this next set right here is your geometric selection tools. Okay they’re going to make selections based off of either a marquee. It’s also known as the marquee tool but the marquee is going to give you basically a square or a rectangular selection and your ellipse tool is going to give you an elliptical or round or circular selection. Now that’s all well and good if the shape is actually round or square right but how do I make a selection based off of an organic shape. Let’s say a body well that kind of brings us to our next set of tools.
Lasso Tools
The next set of tools here are your lasso tools and these tools will allow you to make organic selections by drawing around an object. So let’s say I wanted to select this bathing suit, what I’m going to need to do is hand draw with this first selection, this is just the lasso tool. I’m going to have to hand draw around this bathing suit very very carefully and as you can see it’s not easy to do especially with a mouse to make a selection. Now if you’ll notice up here when I hold down or a click or push it down, the ALT or option key that I’m getting a little bit of a flickering here up in the options palette.
Okay as I mentioned in the first class, this palette up here gives you options that will further enhance the tool that you’re using. So in this particular case, I’m using the lasso tool and I’ve got a few options up here that I can use, so each of these has a different function. So if I hold my cursor over them, I can see that this one will add or combine the shapes. This one will subtract and then this one will intersect. I don’t ever use those. You can use them but again I like efficiency and I don’t like having to cross over an entire image specially if you have a large screen. I don’t like having to cross over the image to constantly get to my function so eventually you learn them and a quick way to do this is to know that your ALT or option will subtract. If you’ll notice on the mouse itself, it’s throwing up a little subtraction sign. If I hold down shift, I get an ad which will add to my selection. If I hold down ALT or CTRL excuse me, ALT option that will subtract from my selection and I can’t tell you the last time, I’ve used intersect in Illustrator. I’ve used intersect all the time but in Photoshop I rarely, if ever used it there, you can see he got rid of everything outside of the selection and kept only what I kept on the inside. So if you can find function for that, make it a utility for you. That’s how that works okay and in the same way, if I hold down ALT or option and let go it’s going to get rid of that section and keep everything else or if I hold down shift, it’s going to add so much like at the addition selection option you have up here. It’s just going to add to your selection, that’s one way to use that.
Polygonal Lasso
Let me show you some of these other lasso tools under here, this one is your polygonal lasso and your polygonal lasso much like the marquee tool is going to make selections that are more geometric and basically all you’re going to do is click drag and it’s going to pivot from your click point, click, click, click, click, until you bring it back together where you’re going to get that full circle and that’s going to let you know that your selection is ready to be complete and when you get there just click and that completes your option. If I take my mouse and put it inside my selection, it will allow me to move the selection. If I click outside of the selection, it’s going to assume that I’m creating a new selection. Also if I’ve got a selection made and I click over to the move tool and move it, it’s going to cut it out okay? It’s not going please note that it’s not going to create a new layer however. So if I deselect this, its flattening that image and this is, these are the sort of things that I’m telling you that it’s important to have a certain amount of history States and/or an additional layer or you need your original layer to be in existence. So that if you mess up, you’ll have it available to you to go back to. I just mentioned history States.
History States
Let’s take a look at that really quick in your settings or in your preferences. It’s here in performance, you want to go down to performance and right here are your history States. Now this is dependent on how much RAM you have in your computer, the higher amount of remnants you have, the more you can hold. The less amount of RAM you have, maybe you want to drop this down a little bit to preserve your RAM, however, I would want to make sure before you do that, that you’re pretty well proficient in the program, so that if you do mess up, you don’t need a lot the lowest. I would maybe take, this is like 20 States, especially if you are using the brush tool or you’re painting of any kind because every time you paint that is going to log as a history, a history stroke and every time I up and down, up and down, up and down or click, click, click, click, it’s going to register as a history stroke here in your history palette. As you can see it’s been recording everything I’ve been doing each step at a time. So if I go back, select polygonal move, you see how it went back three states.
But let’s say I realize I’ve messed up 50 states and I’ve only got 20 States saved or 20 States ability of Photoshop to record, so that I can go back history while I’m hitting command Z or undo or I’m going edit Z or edit undo, it’s only going to have a certain amount depending on how much I’ve set it up. So when you open up your program, set up your history States depending on how much RAM, if you got a decent machine with a good graphics card and a lot of Rams to dispose of, while you’re working in Photoshop. I recommend to get them like nice and hot, like right around 50. If you have a little bit of rim maybe you want to lower that down a little bit and but I wouldn’t go lower than 20. So again if I grab this with the move tool, I have as you can see, I have the transparent background. I’ve actually cut it out if you’ll notice, if I do what I did earlier with my selection and hit CMD J to duplicate the layer, that layer is independent of that background layer and I’ve done no damage to this layer. If that’s what I want so that’s a technique that you can use while you’re using selections to preserve or to let’s say I needed to just cut this particular piece out because I needed to change just the bathing suit and not the skin, I could use this technique just like that. Click all the way around, there’s the circle, I inverted this selection and now I just needed this piece, then I can create a duplicate layer later on. Once things have finalized a little bit more then I can flatten these, but I often like to save my working PSD file and then save a flattened JPEG later depending on the client needs or depending on what I am doing or what I’m using it for. That way I always have a layered PSD to go back. Now once you get into like 50 plus layers, the file is going to be very heavy so it kind of just depends and then you can kind of decide how you want to economize your layer structure. You flatten some things maybe but keep other things and layers. If you know that you’re going to come back and change colors or you’re submitting this for a client, they may want revisions, they may several iterations so, you don’t want to flatten all of your image and not be able to go back and work, that would be a really, really bad thing.
Under the marquee tool you have these other options here single row marquee. Basically all this is a single pixel, if we zoom super close, here you can see that, it is literally a pixel wide that’s good sometimes to draw in, to draw in guides, but you don’t really need that for guides. If you grab your move tool and you come in here into your ruler sand, you click down and drag down, you’re going to get these guides, if you need to have something that is a very specific distance from the edge. For example, if there is a margin like in e-commerce, if there is a margin that has to be exactly 50 pixels from the top of the edge, what I can do is grab one of these guides and put it right there so that I know once I get rid of my selection my mark is exactly 50 pixels.
Okay another thing to note here with the move tool is that if you hover over these guides, it will actually turn into this little move icon right here, it’s kind of a different icon than the regular move tool icon and this is specifically for guides and that allows you to get rid of them. Another way to get rid of the guides is to hit the command and semicolon on PC, it’s going to be CTRL + semicolon and that will toggle on and off your guides. Another place to do that is here under your view, under show you can go over here and there it is that hockey I was just telling you about, CMD +semicolon and in PC it should say CTRL + semicolon and if I want to click off there, there it goes okay again, numerous ways to do the same thing bow shop. Okay so let’s get rid of this. As I was saying, you’ve got several tool options under here and we just went over your single row marquee tool. This is going to cut across horizontally and the other option is going to cut across vertically. So again depends on what you need it for. I don’t use it very frequently, have use it very frequently throughout my career, but there have been very rare occasions where I have actually used it, but just so you know that it is under there and it is there for your disposal okay.
Magic Wand Tool
So the next one, this is your magic wand tool. Now this is what I call a color based selection okay? Your magic wand tool is basically based on the tolerance that you’ve got it set up for, which is set up right here is going to make a selection based off of color. So for instance this background is all grey now, there is a very, very slight tonal variation that comes down here towards the bottom, but towards the two pit gets a little bit lighter and my tolerance is set kind of low so if I crank this up to 100 and these tolerances are based on a zero to 100 scale, if I set it up to 100 and I click in here, the one tool is going to select anything that is remotely gray okay and that includes her hair which is starting to become a little bit opaque and the gray color is shining through or the pixels are so fine that I am not separating the details from the background so that’s with it set up pretty high and look what’s happening down here as well, the nail bed as well as some of the skin is even being included in the selection and even some of the skin is also not being included in the selection and the reason for that is, is because that light that’s bouncing off of the back of the wall is reflecting onto the skin. So Photoshop is reading at a very high tolerance level and including it in my selection even though that’s not what I wanted to do. Check out this, here it’s not going to add this gray to it because it didn’t connect with the other gray, it was separated by the color of the skin all the way around it. So if I wanted to add that just like the lasso tool, If I hold down shift and click in here then it will, if I hold down option or all I can get rid of it by subtracting it now, just like with a high tolerance level, with a low tolerance level, it’s going to be more stringent or stricter as to what pixels includes inside of its selection.
So if I click in here, as you can see and as I mentioned earlier, the total range is changing from the top of the image, to the bottom of the image and since this is a color based selection and I’ve set my tolerance relatively low, it’s assuming that I’m being very selective with my selection, so when I click on here it’s getting pixels that are as close to that specific pixel color as possible. If I went even lower, you would see the selection get even narrower, what’s this you see how it’s even, it’s even tighter of a selection. Let’s split the difference, let’s just go to like something like 50 and that while that worked well it’s also including some of these colors, which are more turquoise or blue or in the cyan channel, then they are great but again since it’s close, it’s going to include it and assume that I want that as well. Same thing that’s happening here on the edge notice with the hair on the arms, it’s not getting all the way to the edge of the skin and up here it is, but down here it’s not and in some places you’re going to see better selection around the hair. Now it’s including some of the hair and a lot of it is not which is not going to give us a very clean or very good selection. Again that’s the one tool which is a color based selection tool and it’s going to make selections based off of color. Now it works in some cases, solid colors where there isn’t a whole lot of gradation and there’s a lot of separation between the object that you’re trying to select and the background that it may be on but in this particular case, it’s not doing exactly what I needed to do. So, let’s see if there’s some other tools in here that may help us a hotkey for your one, two. As you can see right here is W, so if I hit W, it’s just going to give me whatever tool is at the top, but what if I want some of the tools that are on the bottom, if I hold shift and hit the W two, it’s going to cycle through all of the tools that are in that set. So let’s go to the object selection here and I like this tool a lot. Photoshop has got some incredible back in software ninja stuff that, that’s not my expertise but, I just know how to use them. They’ve got this ninja stuff working for you in the background and object selection basically much like the marquee tool, you’re going to make a selection around an object and Photoshop is going to try to figure out what exactly you are trying to select.
So if I just select this band and let go, Photoshop is going to say it looks like you’re trying to select just the band, that’s a great start because as I showed you earlier, when I was trying to manually make this selection, it becomes difficult trying to do it with a mouse and not everybody is working on a Wacom tablet or a screen. For that matter that you can do the selections like this, where I’m drawing on the screen. So having tools at your disposal that are going to make your job a lot easier are really helpful so, as you can see here, it’s not perfect but it did a pretty good job of grabbing the section that I want it. Let’s open that up a little bit and let’s just say I want the entire bathing suit off of her skin and the background. I’m going to try to stay as tight to that as possible so Photoshop can figure it out and again this has done a pretty good job. I’ve got a few edges here that I need to clean up, it didn’t grab this or that miss a little piece here but I got the majority of the body which is exactly what I wanted. It also included some of this background but again I can go in here with my lasso tool and subtract out, take away from anything that I don’t want or don’t need and the last one here under this module is the quick selection tool and again these magic wand tools are color based selections. So it’s reading this base off of the colors. Now I picked this image specifically because there’s a pattern and it’s not as straight forward or simple so when you come in here and you’ve got all these patterns, it’s breaking up all of the visual continuity on both, on the front end, and on the backend.
So Photoshop has to figure out what is it exactly that you’re trying to select so if we grab this tool and as you can see it’s like, it works like a brush where I can open up the brush, I’m hitting the bracket tools, the left and right or if I click up here, I’ve got a size that I can use, a size slider for the brush, it works very similar to brushes which we’re going to get into in later lessons. But this tool allows me to make selections like a brush so if I go in here and click and drag, you can see it’s going to make a selection based off of the color but because the pattern is broken up, it’s also breaking up the selection. If I want to add to the selection, I can hold down the shift key or I can click on this option so that it’s always in an addition mode. That way I don’t have to hold down the shift key, I can just click and drag and when I let go and make a new selection, it’s going to continue to add to my selection. Now as I mentioned that’s a pattern so it’s pretty difficult to do so. What if it’s a little bit more solid of a color like the skin? Boom! You can see a pot it didn’t even stutter, now I got a little bit of extra right here because it’s not completely perfect but it did a lot of the work for me and these selections are very tight but just like anything else, I still need to make a few refinements in here to kind of get this exactly what I want it to be, but this is a great tool when the color allows you to use it in the way that it’s been designed to use.
In Conclusion
All right guys. That’s the first four tools here in how to use selections in Photoshop. Be sure to LIKE, subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you can get updates on our future videos. Don’t forget to check out part 2 of this lesson’s series. Click on the video below.
