10 Selection tips in 10 mins in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. 10 Photoshop Selection Tips - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class 10 selection tips in 10 minutes in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're going to look at 10 selection tips, things such as being able to save and load a selection. How you can use a selection to control paste, rotating, repositioning and resizing selections, and using things like quick mask and quick select. There's a heap of learning in this very, very short class. Now as you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class and learning things from it, do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes to recommending it to others, and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now let's get started with 10 selection tips in 10 minutes or less. 2. Pt 1 - Before we start: Before we get started with our 10 Selection tips, there are few things that I'm assuming that you already know. I'm assuming that you understand that when you open a photograph, you have a background layer and that, that is locked. That means that if you want to select part of the sky and delete it, you can't delete to a transparent background because this is a background layer. So you'll need to double-click on this layer and click "OK" to convert it from a background layer into a regular layer. In later versions of Photoshop, I'm just going to undo this. In later versions of Photoshop, you can just click the "Lock" icon to convert this into a layer. I'm also assuming that you've used some of the Selection tools, such as the Rectangular Marquee Tool or the Elliptical Marquee Tool. That you know what we're seeing on the screen here now are called marching ants, and they are showing us the border of our selection. I'm also assuming that once you've made a selection, you know how to turn that selection off. You'll do that by choosing Select, and then Deselect. There's a shortcut key here that I do suggest you learn, it's Control D on the PC, Command D on the Mac. You'll be using it so often as you're working in Photoshop, that that one really bears learning. Now, we've covered the assumptions, let's get onto our 10 tips. 3. Pt 2 - 10 tips: The first of our tips relate to the Marquee Selection tools. You have two tools, the rectangular Marquee and the elliptical Marquee tool, and they work in similar ways. If you hold the Shift key as you drag out either of these tools you constrain the proportions of the shape that you're drawing, so you'll draw a square or a perfect circle. When you're drawing out the elliptical Marquee tool, in particular, you'll notice that the circle is going to start in the top-left corner. Well, you can make it start in the center if you hold down the Alt or Option key as you start drawing, then optionally add the Shift key if you want to create a perfect circle. When you're dragging out one of these Marquee shapes, if you don't get the selection in the right place and you're still drawing the selection, hold the Spacebar down as you move the selection into a different location. Let go of the Spacebar and you can continue to draw your shape. Only when you let go of the left mouse button is the actual selection made. Moving a selection by harnessing the power of the Control or Command key. In the previous video, you learned that as you were drawing a selection, if you use the Spacebar, you could move the selection around. Once you've finished drawing your selection, you can tap the Control key that would be Command on a Mac, that will turn the cursor into this white arrow with a little white box to its bottom-right. That means that you can move your selection around wherever you want it to appear. If you now want to cut, you can hold the Control or Command key and you'll see that the cursor is now an arrow with scissors allowing you to cut that selection out, as you would expect it to do. Rotating, repositioning and resizing a selection. Once you've created a selection such as this square here, you do have some options for rotating, repositioning, and resizing this selection. To do this, you'll choose Select, and then Transform Selection. It's also possible to right-click and choose Transform Selection. This allows you to rotate the selection. You can also resize it. I'm holding the Shift key here to constrain it to a perfect shape. You can obviously move it into any position that you like. Once you've done that, you click the checkmark here to turn off the transformation process and now at this point, you could do something such as moving or copying the selection. Save and load a selection. If you go in to the trouble of making a really complex selection as I have on my cat here, you may want to save your selection. To do this, choose Select and then Save Selection. I'm going to add this as a new channel. I'm going to call this Moly because that's the name of the cat. I'm going to click "Okay". If we have a look in the channel's palette, you'll see that you have the RGB composite channel, red, green, and blue channels. We now have a channel which is an Alpha channel with our selection in it. I'm going to deselect the selection. At anytime in the future provided I save this file as a layered PSD file I can come back in and choose, Select, Load Selection. I'm going to select the Moly channel and click "Okay", and it's now loaded as a selection, so I can do with it whatever I want to do with this selection. Using a selection to control paste. I have a seagull selected here and I'm going to copy it using Edit, Copy. I'm going to an image that I want to place the seagull in. Now if I choose Edit, Paste, it's going to be pasted into the middle of the image. I'm just going to undo that. If I want it to be pasted in another location, I'm going to one of my selection tools. I'm just going to select a really small portion of the image here and then choose Edit, Paste. The seagull is pasted always within the edge of this image, but over the area that I have selected. Add to and subtract from a selection. I have the Quick Select tool selected here, I'm going to make a quick selection over this flower. I've got the flower selected, but I've got a bit here that I didn't want to select. I'm going to make my brush a little bit smaller using the open and closed square bracket keys. I'm going here to the Minus option, and that allows me to select over an area to remove from the selection. You can do the same thing by holding the Alt or Option key if you're using a Mac and that switches any tool into the Minus tool. If you hold the Shift key down, then you're going to get the Add to so you can drag over something else to add it to your current selection. These same key strokes can be used with other tools as well. You could, for example, flip between the Quick Selection tool and the Magic Wand tool if you wanted to, to add or subtract an area from your selection. You could even go to the rectangular Marquee tool and I'm going to select Add to this selection, and I'm just going to add a rectangular Marquee selection to my rose, so I have a rectangle plus the rose. Select what you don't want, the power of inverse. For this image, I want to remove all the greenery, but rather than taking the time to select the greenery, I'm going to select the bit I don't want to select, which is the rose because this is the area I actually want to protect. Having selected what I don't want to delete, I'm going to choose, Select and then Inverse so that just inverts the selection so now everything around the flower is selected, I'll press "Delete". Sometimes making the opposite selection, selecting the thing that you don't want to select and then using inverse is actually the quickest way to achieve an end result. Master the Lasso tools. There are three Lasso tools. There's the regular Lasso tool, the polygonal Lasso tool, and the magnetic Lasso tool. The magnetic Lasso tool will select around a shape and it actually looks for the edges all by itself. If it doesn't get things exactly right, you can just press the Delete key to wind back and then you can come forward again. If necessary, you can just pin it down by clicking where you want it to select and then continue on with that tool. The Lasso tool and the polygonal Lasso tool work in conjunction with each other. With the Lasso tool, we're just going to drag around a curve to make the selection ourselves. If I want to switch to the polygonal Lasso tool, I can tap the Alt or Option key, and then it becomes a polygon tool so I can select the edges. When I want to go back to using the regular Lasso tool, I'm just going to click with the left mouse button and continue to hold the left mouse button down. Now I'm going to let go the Alt or Option key and I can go back to working with the Lasso tool. Start complex selections using the Quick Select tool. Quite often, the Quick Select tool is the best tool to use to get started making complex selections. You'll drag over to make a rough selection, finesse it a little bit and then look to another tool to use. In the case of the cat here, that would be the Select and Mask tool in later versions of Photoshop, it would be Refine Edge in earlier versions of Photoshop. For an image like this, I can use the Quick Select tool to get started on selecting the gondola. Once I've made a reasonable selection, I could go back with, for example, the Lasso tool or even the Magic Wand tool into certain areas here to finesse the selection so that I could select, for example, these smaller decorative elements. Paint a selection using Quick Mask mode. It's possible to paint selections. In Photoshop, you'll need to select the brush tool, set your colors to black and white and click here on the Quick Mask option. You'll see that the layer background color becomes pink, and the way I have mine set up, anything that is pink is going to be selected so I can paint over this castle, for example, to select it. Obviously, I'd be a lot more careful as I was making my selection but you can use this tool either to paint, to create a selection, or you can use it with an existing selection to actually fine tune that selection, if you go into the wrong area, just flip your colors around and paint out the mistake. When you're done, click here to get back out of Quick Mask mode and you can see your selection. If your Quick Mask mode doesn't work the same way as mine, double-click on it just to check and see what you're saying. I have mine set up so that the selected areas are colored red. It is possible to have it set up the other way however. The bonus tip today is bringing back Refine Edge to Photoshop CC. The newest tool in Photoshop CC for improving the edge of an image like this is to use Select and Mask. Now a lot of people don't like Select and Mask and a lot of people actually have trouble even running it on their computers. If you want to get back to the old Refine Edge tool, open up the Select menu and before you select, Select and Mask, hold down the Shift key. Then when you click on Select and Mask, you bring back the old Refine Edge tool and you can go ahead and refine the edge of your selection in the way that you're used to doing in earlier versions of Photoshop. A lot of people really like this tool so if you're one of them, this is how you can get back to using it the way that you're used to use it. 4. Project and wrapup: Your project for this class is to simply tell me in the class project area which of these tips really spoke to you, which was a tip that you weren't aware of that you think now you're going to use. I hope that you enjoyed this video and I hope that you learned things about Photoshop that you weren't otherwise aware of. As you were watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt that let you recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learned things from it, do two things for me. Firstly, answer yes to whether you would recommend it to others. Secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.