Using the selection tools can be tricky. It takes a careful hand and a squinty eye.
Otherwise, it's easy.
A friend emailed me yesterday and asked for help on selecting one of the snowflakes in the following photo and I thought that it would be a great opportunity to do a tutorial as well.
This is the photo we will be working with:
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| Or more specifically, this part of the the illustration: | |
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In this tutorial I will be showing you how to use the: 1. Magic Wand Tool These are easy, and much used tools in Photoshop, so it's a good idea to get familiar with them. To see both tools hold down with your mouse, and the flyout menu will appear. |
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 Quick Tip: To grab your Quick Selection Tool or Magic Wand Tool quickly and easily use shortcut key "W" for Wand. And to switch between the two tools press Shift+W. |
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We'll start with the Magic Wand Tool. The shortcuts are the hardest part of these tools, but don't worry, you'll quickly get used to them. Some things you should know about the Magic Selection Tool: The Tolerance Setting: Contiguous Box: |
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| Rather than select the actual snowflake, we're going to select and delete the background - sometimes this is easier with more detailed objects. Then if needed we will add more to the selection by holding Shift while we keep clicking on the parts we want to delete. | |
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| Before you do anything else, let me show you how to use the Quick Selection Tool, and then I'll show you how to refine you edge before you delete anything. | |
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Okay, now onto the Quick Selection Tool. This tool isn't necessarily as good with fine detail as it is with larger areas and many different colors. However this tool is slightly more intuitive than the Magic Wand Tool. You use it just as you would the paint brush, or in other words you "paint" a selection. You can also unselect areas just like with the Magic Wand Tool by holding down Alt. |
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| Quick Tip: (I love this one) To increase or decrease the size of your brush for the selection tool or anything else, especially the Brush Tool use the bracket keys. Left bracket makes it smaller and right bracket makes it bigger. I always keep my hand on these when using the Quick Selection Tool or the Brush Tool. |
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Now that you know how to use both selection tools, on to: Refining the Edge: This is something that you can do before clicking delete or creating a cut from your image. The name says it all - it refines your selection edge. |
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| So click on the button (you know you want to) and the dialogue box is pretty self explainatory. What I love about this is the preview - it shows you exactly how smoothing or feathering it will look on your photo as well as explaining with the cool pictures at the bottom. | |
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Now that you've refined your edge perfectly, you may hit delete to get rid of the backround. Or if you want to keep part of it in tact you can right click on your selected area and click "layer via cut" and this will slice the image, leaving you with two layers. Then you can mess with the background one if you need to. Well, that's all for now, play around with the tools and get comfortable with them, they'll be your close friends throughout your Photoshop experience. Hope this helped and if anyone else has any helpful hints feel free to leave a comment! Love, |
I tried out your tutorial - very slick! Thanks!!
Another great tutorial - you remind me I need to hone my Photoshop skills!
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