Transcripts
1. Intro to Selections: hi and welcome to part four of the Complete Photoshopped mastery Course I'm Steve McDonald . And in this part of the course, we're gonna learn how to make selections and selections are important for a lot of reasons . In fact, I use selections in almost every edit job that I do and just to give you a really quick example. If I go up here and grab my quick selection tool and I go click on this cappuccino mug, I've now selected that mug and any edits that I do are only going to affect that mug. So if I wanted to actually move that mug, I can switch to my move tool and I can just click on and grab that and pull that out of the image. I could move it somewhere else. I could move it up into another image, so that's really powerful gonna control Z to drop that back where it belongs, and then one other really awesome things. If I hit control shift I and invert my selection so that I'm just selected on the background, I can actually do edits to this background that won't affect the image. And just as a quick example, if I took my brush tool and I'm selected on a dark color, I'll hit the square brackets to make my brush way bigger. And I'm just gonna brush over this really quickly. A couple times you can see, I've just completely transformed the background. Now, of course, I would want to do that on a separate layer, because what? I've just done this destructive editing, but I am not keeping this image is just for examples, but those air two ways to use selections. And I'm gonna teach you a whole bunch of additional ways to make selections and use them in your photo shop. So thanks for being here, and I will see you in the next lecture.
2. Intro to Selection Tools part 1 - Lasso and Marquee Tools: Hello and welcome back in this section, we're going to be learning about selection tools. We've been learning about layers, and now that you know how to use layers will take it to the next level by learning how to select specific parts of your image and then do things with them, whether it's creating a new layer from them or changing the color or the darkness or whatever, we're going to just learn this through examples. Okay, so let's take a quick look at the tools will be looking at. And then we'll dive, right it. The selection tools will be talking about her all found right up here. Okay, The first section is the shape tools. So you have a rectangular marquis, an elliptical marquee, and then these two you'll probably never use. They just select like one row of pixels, which is almost never enough. But as they sound, the elliptical marquee tool will select a circle or a little the rectangular marquee tool. Select a square or a rectangle, and these can be useful if you have a specific shape, like a square or a circle, and it's a very sharp edge, and you need to select it. Generally speaking, I don't use these very often, but they're here and you can use them. For instance, if you wanted to say select, this whole image will shrink it down a little bit to make it easier. I'm gonna hit Zaeef resume, and then I'm gonna hit old option on your Mac and click a couple times to see him out. And then I'm gonna go back, and I'm gonna select on this tool and you'll notice when I hover over it. The marquee tool is m. So hit the M and now I'm selected on it. So let's say I want to select this whole image. I would just left click outside of the image and start to drag and you'll notice in this case, it pops to it as these will snap guides and it snaps to the edges, which makes it really easy. And then I just drag until it snaps to this end. Basically, you just pull outside of the corner and then you can see it's has the little marching ants , which there those little dotted lines going all the way around my selection. And I just released the mouse and I've now selected that, but it's just not the easiest way. So now you know how to use that. But again, you're not gonna use it very often. So we'll get some tools that you're gonna probably use a lot more. Now if I'm selected in something and I want to use a different tool or get out of that selection, I can just hit control or command on your Mac and Dee and thats de selecting your selection . You can also go up to the select menu here. You'll notice you can hit, de select or re select, which is a really nice one. So if I wanted to get that back, I can hit re select and I'll select it again. And then you can also select the inverse which in this case, I don't have. I have the whole thing selected, so there is no inverse toe everything. But I'll show you how to use that later. And then there's select all and notice that that's control. A. That's really important to know, and I'll show you why. Let's de select this real quick. If I want to select this whole thing, I just hit control a Them selects the whole image that could be really useful when you need to do and add it to the entire image again, I'm gonna hit control deed to de select that, and we'll keep moving on what a little tool tip is that you can either left click and hold and then hover over whichever one you want to use and then release the mouse. Or you can right click and it will bring up the menu, and then you hover over whichever one you want to use and you left. Click the mouse or even better, you can hit your shortcut keys. So again the marquee tool is the AM. So for Head Am well, let me have the wiki. I'll move to my move tool. Watch up here. Now I want to go to my marquee tool. I hit the M that selects it. The problem, you might say, is, what if you want to select the rectangular marquee tool, not the elliptical marquee tool? Well, you can hold shift and M, and it will toggle through the Marquis tools notice. It's not bringing up those other tools because they just aren't used. But you can hit shift and toggle back and forth. Okay, The same goes for the lasso tools. If I right click here, you'll see it gives me three different versions of the lasso tool. We have the regular lasso tool. We have the political lasso tool, which does straight lines. And we have the magnetic lasso tool which basically kind of snaps to whatever line it confined that it thinks you might be trying to follow. And I'll show you how these all work. But again, I want to show you how to use the shortcut. So I'm gonna go off of this and I'm gonna hit V to go back to my move tool, and I'm going to hit shift and l first I'll get my political lasso tool. I hit it again. I'll get the magnetic lasso tool. When you can see a little magnet. I come on top of the last, so there. And then if I hit it again, I'll get my regular lasso tool, which is just a regular lasso. And I'll show you how these work real quickly. While I'm in the lasso tool, you basically just draw with it and let's go ahead and do command zero to get this full size and you just click to start it and then you hold it and you drag and you just draw with it and you can see that this would require a Thanh of hand eye coordination and precision to outline a mountain like this accurately. But if you're up for that, please be my guest. But I'll show you either easier ways. And this tool could be really incredible, though, for doing a little bit of touch upon your selections. And I'll show you that later, too. But to close this loop to close the selection, use draw back around to the beginning, and when you get to the beginning, you simply connect and release, and whatever you've drawn around is selected. Okay, let's go ahead and control D to get rid of that. And let's go ahead and hit. Shift in Alan select a different lasso tool. Put this up in the sky so you can see it better let shift and L. And now we're in the political lasso tool and will use this one in a different example. But basically, you just click and move the tool and notice as I move. It's just going to keep a straight line in any direction so I can basically select a square click again. Move, click and move. Push again and move and notice on this one. I have a little circle right next to the tool. You have to see that circle in order to complete your selection. If I'm down here and I click, it's not gonna complete my selection. I have to go hover over the beginning of the selection and see that little circle in order to select it. So I do that and I click. And again I have my selection. Now One note about this. Let's go Control D If you are cruising along and you're making selections and you decide Oh , I didn't want that one. Then you could just hit the delete key with a backspace, and it will get rid of your last click. Okay, if I do that four times 1234 that I'm just going to start back to the beginning. OK, so you're not stuck with it. You can always get back to it, but you just click, click, click get your little circle click and you selected for me to show you how the inverse selection works. So right now we have this Polly on selected here in the middle of our picture, we can go to the select menu and say in verse and notice it added some marching ants, those dotted lines around the outside of the image will. Now, instead of having this little piece of the image selected, this is the only part that's not selected. Everything else is selected, okay? And that could be very useful. If you want to select, say, this whole image, but not one of these little hikers. Then you can just select the hiker and then click in verse, and it will select everything else. Okay, again, let's control de or command deed to get rid of that selection, and we're going to stop the video there. In the next video, we'll continue talking about the lasso tools, and then we'll dive into the crown jewel of the selection tools, which is the quick selection tool
3. Intro to Selection Tools part 2 - Quick Selection Tool: Okay, So in this lecture, we're gonna continue talking about selection tools, and we're gonna really quick go over the magnetic lasso tool and then we're going to dive into the one that you're really gonna love, which is the quick selection tool. We have one more lasso tool. Also hit shift l and remember Aiken scroll through these. We have the magnetic lasso tool. If you look up here, you'll see what I'm talking about. Magnetic lasso tool, regular lasso tool, political lasso tool and back to the magnetic lasso tool. That's the one we're gonna try now. So I'm going to zoom in here a little bit more instead of using the Z key. I'm just gonna hit Ault and scroll with my mouse, and it's gonna zoom in wherever I'm aimed. And then I'm gonna slide my image a little bit using another shortcut which we worked on Hit the space bar to get the hand at Dragon Move was Get that right there. Okay. When he released that, it goes back to your magnetic lasso tool. And the way this works is you just click once and then you drag. I'm released the mouse, so it is just dragging along and you're going to see it's gonna just try and grab the sharpest line that it confined. You can see that for the most part, it does all right. But notice if I get off the line a little bit, seem like pulling up here. It's still trying to pull. Didn't do that when we hit the backs basically back a bit. If I'm up above the line a little bit, it's still going to kind of pull in, snap down the line from below the line. It's still gonna do the same thing. She's trying to snap up to that line, and sometimes it won't do what you want. This is best for very jagged objects, but that have a sharp line, sharp edge. Okay, so, for instance, like to see it's not behaving right here. So what I can do is just hit backspace, and then I can actually manually set it here. I can go to where I want. I want it up on this ridge of snow. That's kind of the same color as the background, and I'm just gonna click, and that will manually mark anchor points. All these little dots here are anchor points and then I could go back to just dragging if it's gonna work for me and thats working all right, so we can go the But again, you can see it's gonna miss some of those spots. So again, this isn't the most ideal selection tool, but it does have its place. And then, if I want toe close, this one than what I do is just drag it all the way back around. Same deal. I have to get to the beginning, the starting point. And make sure I see that little circle next to the magnet to It's hard to see on this mountain, But once you get there, the click has your selection. Okay? And then finally, let's look at the really the best selection tools, in my opinion. And most people's opinions hit control de to de Select that. Don't go to the quick selection tool. The magic wand tool used to be the good one, but it is okay if you're gonna select something that's exactly the same color. Like if this sky was all the same color like a bright blue that I could click once on it, and it would select the whole sky, but it's a little finicky, and the quick selection tool is honestly just the crown jewel. So we'll select on that again. You can hit shift and W to scroll back and forth through these and make sure you're on the quick selection tool. And the nice thing about this tool is I could actually go full screen control zero. I don't have to be zoomed in super tight, and I can just select these mountains. Or I could even select the sky and then select the inverse. So let's do that because the skies a little more consistence gonna be easier to select. So I'm gonna cruise through here like this. Let's select everything and so you know, just, like, snapped and selected everything and you'll see it's still not perfect, right? But that was so much faster in there. Easy ways to modify it. All you have to do is hit the Ault key option key on your Mac. You'll get a little minus, and now we can subtract from the selection so we don't want the mountain selected. Along with the skies. We go and we just click and drag over these parts of the mountain. And the cool thing about this tool is it gets smarter as you go. So as I'm selecting these mountains, it's learning what I'm trying to select. And it's going to do a better and better job as I go. And again if you have a spot that Mrs. I thought I had one back here. I don't see it now, but Mr Spot here. So you just click and oh, there's a spot that's that's supposed to be sky So I want to change this back to this guy and make it part of the selection. I release the old key, and I just click and re select that I can hit the all key and take some of this out of the selection. Few, these little things. And there's a whole corner over here that got missed. Okay, so you do that they're spot right there. Okay, so I'm selecting everything just right. And the other thing you can do with this tool is if you zoom in, zoom in a little bit. You could get a better view of what you've done or not done so I can go on refine this even Mawr, you see, it's kind of it kind of jumps and moves to kind of suit What I'm selecting because it's learning what I want, which is super cool. And what you do is you just use the space bar and the hand tool, and you move along the edges like this. If you could just keep selecting things, keep fixing and refining. And it doesn't take much before your dialed, and you've got everything the way you want, okay? And any time you make a selection is good. To do that through the whole thing, just keep moving along and selecting, moving on long and selecting. We're not going to get to detailed with it on this one because I just want to show you scroll back out. And then now we have that selected. And again, if we wanted to do the inverse of it and select the mountains, we got a slug and we just click in verse, and now you'll notice the marching answer down here. So I've got this selected. Okay, so that's really the quick summary of the selection tools. They're hugely powerful, and in the next lecture what I'm going to show you is how we can take this image and make it look like this just by using another background image and our selection tools that we just used. Okay, so before you go take that next lecture, go and play with the tools. Just pull up any old picture. You can pull up this mountain scene. This is one of the downloads for the next video and practice. Just making selections and then hitting control de to de select and practice your keystrokes. Use the M from our key L for lasso and W For quick selection tools. Use your shift key to toggle through him and just play with OK, then dive into this next lecture. I'll show you how to do some awesome things with the parts of your image that you're selecting. I'll see you in the next election.
4. Assignment #7 - Select and Change the Background on a Mountain Scene: Hi. And welcome back in this assignment, we're gonna use our selection to then do some really significant changes to our scene. And in this case, since we've selected these mountains, we're gonna actually swap out the background with different sky images. So I already have this selected from the last lecture. So four year assignment. You'll want to select this. And if you need help with that, go back to the previous lecture for the walk through. But once you have this selected, then we're going to make a new layer from this selection and the way that you do that, it's just hit control J while you have it selected and it's gonna automatically make a new layer. And I'll make this a little bit bigger so you can see it better. You can see from the thumbnail that now this layer, the background has been cut out. So that's just transparent pixels. And the foreground is what we had selected. And if I hide this layer that we have preserved underneath, you'll see that the skies now gone. And this is where the fun begins with players because we can start to add new backgrounds in place So let me just show that again. We'll just leave it on for now, and we're going to go get some other backgrounds. So let's jump over to this one. We have a picture of the northern lights here, and to copy this over into our other image, we go ahead and go to the move tool, which is V That's your keyboard shortcut Left click to grab it. We're gonna drag it up, too. This image that we're working on, drag it back into the image and you'll see a little plus sign by my cursor you release. And it drops that in the gym. Now what it's done is it's dropped that layer on top of our other layer, and so you can see it's covering it up. Now all we have to do is grab that layer and slide it down and drop it below our mountain layer. And bam, we've got that background. Now you could see that this doesn't quite fit, and we can move this around by just clicking on it or making sure that this layer is selected here. And then we're gonna hit control T Command Tianna Mac, to show our transform controls You can see now we have these little transform controls and I'll scroll out a little bit hitting cult and scrolling. And then we could just adjust this to fit. So we'll go grab this, and you really just have to get it to the edges. You can go beyond if you want to, like, make it bigger. Depending on how it matches up with your scene, we'll just go toe like well, do, actually kind of big, and then we can play with it and move it around. So see, you can could move it lower. You can drop it down to get it really intense. You could bring it up to see you see a little more of the sky back there and then when you're ready, you just hit enter and you're done. So weaken, Select on this layer and we can move it around, or we can select on our mountain layer and we can move it as well. So if you want to get more sky and make it all about the sky, you have to be a little careful of what's in the background there. Obviously you don't want those trees showing up so you'd probably have to go like there. Or he could bring this wait out if you want it. And then you could grab your sky layer and bring it down to to hide your trees. But it just depends on what you want your focus to be on. I'm gonna just hit control Z to plop those back where they were. And then we could put other background images in here too. So we've got the northern lights. That's pretty cool. But what if we wanted to put some just regular clouds in there again? Make sure you're on the move tool, which is V grab it with my left, clicking it, drag it up to here, dragged back down in and release and plops it in on that time I was selected on this, so it actually put it in the right place, which is nice, and then we'll move it around to fit it, and that one just happens to fit just fine. And then you can just move it to wherever you want it. I want more of these billowy clouds. I just bring it up like that. If I want more of the just simple smooth clouds will do it right around there. You can see how that completely transforms the vibe of this image, and then you'll notice like you're not seeing this image because it's hidden under here. But if I wanted to get that one back, all I do is hide this guy, and I'm into that completely different scene. It just depends on which ones on top, Okay, and then let's do one more just for fun. We'll go get some just bright, brilliant blue sky. Move toe left, click drag up into that tab, drag it down and drop it. Yes, and I would just have pure blue sky and again watch out for your background elements. Make sure that things aren't peeking through but will just slide this down. And there you go. And again, if I wanted to move this layer down to get more sky, I could get to like there if I wanted. I like it where it is. Do you ask? So we'll just leave that. So all we did was go to our background layer, make a selection of the mountains using our quick selection tool, and then, while were selected on the background And while we have this selected, we had command J to make a duplicate layer, and it makes a new layer just of that selection. And then we put that selection on top, and we drop different background layers in behind it and depending on which one you decide to hide or show determines which background you see. And we can even take this one step further based on what you know about adjustment layers. And while we're clicked on this layer, weaken, go and add a new adjustment layer for brightness and contrast, and we can adjust the way that this looks. The trick is so say we wanted to go lighter. You'll notice. It's also lightening up the sky because this adjustment layers brightening everything below it. But what if we just wanted to brighten up the mountains? Because we like the dark sky? Well, then we just hover between the two of these depressed the old key or option on a Mac, and you'll notice. Now we have this little arrow with a box, and we're just gonna clip this adjustment layer to the layer below it. So I hold Ault or option, and then I just click and notice that put that little arrow there. This is now attached just to this layer. So if I increase the brightness, notice the mountains get brighter or darker, but the sky stays the same. So now we can adjust our layer here. And so if we wanted this to be more of like a blue Bird day. Beautiful, bright, sunny day. We just increase the brightness if we wanted to be Maura Moody. Nighttime scene. Almost a Ziff. This is an early sunset. We then we reduce the brightness. That's a little unrealistic because this looks like sunshine, so you have to keep those in things in mind. This would be better suited, brighter as more of a daytime scene. And then, of course, you can toggle it on and off like that, and then we can also toggle. On off are different backgrounds. Let's get this out of the way. Well, toggle offer are different backgrounds, and we could see what happens. I actually need that back, and we can see what happens as we adjust the mood of these mountains and how it relates to the sky. So the blue sky picture and this cloud picture of the mountains do better when they're brighter. But if we go to the night sky with the northern lights here, then where this is really at night time sky, it doesn't actually make any sense. So then we could go for a darker feel. We could either increase the contrast, just play with it a little bit. If we increase the contrast, bring down the light. It's gonna look a little bit more like an evening seen with the stars that are just first coming out after the sunset. And while we're at it, this one I like the idea of taking this and moving it down. See, you really see more of this northern lights. Okay, so your assignment is to G o. Do your selection on your mountains and then download these other images and click and drag or copy and paste them into this image. Make sure they're below this mountain layer and then play around with um and then, if you want, you could even create a brightness and contrast adjustment layer, and you can play around with your mountain image. Then you could just toggle everything off. You could go to different layers of that when you have to move it up a little bit and you can just play with your different layers and play with your adjustment layer to kind of see how everything looks. Okay, Go do that. And be sure to post your things in the Q and A and hit me with any questions that you have . Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lecture will dive right into another assignment that will help you to refine your selections and make better selections when the subject is a little bit more difficult.
5. Assignment #8 - Refining Your Selection: Change the Color of Coffee Beans: Hi. And welcome back in this assignment, we're gonna work on refining our selections and you can download this image from this lecture. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna do a very good selection on these coffee beans, and then we're going to just modify the color a little bit. We're gonna add kind of like a purple overlay to this to just kind of give these Samore pop in some more richness. So first I'm going to hit the old key, and I'm going to scroll in a bit so I can see this better. And then one thing I want you to get in the habit of doing is first of all, you want to go to your layer. You wanna lock that bottom layer just to preserve your original image? So you're working non destructively, and then we're going to make a copy of this layer, and we're gonna work on that so that if we mess anything up, we'll still have this nice locked layer here that we can always go back to. And the way you do that is you either grab this and drag it down here to the new layer icon and do it like that. Or let me unlock this and to lead it. And I'll show you another way to make a copy. Make sure you selected on that layer by clicking on it and hit control J or command J on a Mac. He knows that made a copy, It didn't lock it, and it's basically just kind of ready to go. Okay, so now we can get in here and make our selection. And that way, if we do any destructive edits, which we're not going to you. But if you did on accident, you'd still have this preserved layer down here. And now we're gonna go grab our selection tool. And again, my favorite one is the quick, select tool, which is this guy right here. And you can see right now I'm on the move, tool. But I'm going to use my keyboard shortcuts. And I'm going to hit the w key. You know, knows switches to the quick, select tool. And now I have it as my tool. And if for some reason it doesn't go to the quick, select tool, you may have to hit shift and w because remember, that will scroll you through these selection tools. And so if you happen to already be on the magic long tool, you can just hit, shift and keep clicking, and that will get you the quick selection toe. And we can change the size of our tool by hitting the square brackets. You can go bigger or you go smaller with left. Brockett Key and fairly big is gonna be good for this, for starters and was go right to our coffee beans and will start to click and drag around, and it's gonna pretty quickly select what we need. Kind of just go up to the edges if you need to make it a little bit smaller. By hitting that square brackets, you can get into some smaller spots. That's fine. And then you can also zoom in, or you can hit control zero or command zero on a Mac to get in closer and we're getting closer like this. You'll notice that what it did was it did a good job. Let me move to the move to also have a pointer and at the V okay, it did a good job of selecting along some of these edges of the beans, but where it's kind of blurry or where there are shadows underneath. Let me find a good one. All right, here's a good one. There's a shadow here that is dark. And so we've selected this shadow. We don't want that shadow, because if we put a purple overlay on these beans, it's gonna kind of give him a purple tinge. But we don't wanna die this White Bull Purple. So what we need to do is make some refinements to our selections. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna zoom in Mawr gonna hit the old key and scroll. If that doesn't work for you can get the Z key and then that gives you your zoom tool and you just click to zoom okay, Or it is him Back out. You hit the old key, Hankins it back out. But this is pretty good. Then we're going to switch to a different selection tool to make these refinements. The quick, select tool is great for getting the bulk of it. But getting a sharp selection on these blurry, blended areas with quick selection tool is difficult. So what we're going to do is go to our lasso tool. Remember, that's this guy right here, and we're gonna head the L. And if it doesn't immediately come up for you or another selection tool comes up, you may have have to hit shift in L. And then you can toggle through them until you get to the regular lasso tool. And since we've already made a selection with one tool, you may need to go into the options menu up here. You'll notice these little boxes here. The 1st 1 is to make a new selection. This one is to add to a selection. This one is to subtract from a selection, and this one is to intersect selections, which we don't worry about for now. But if you click, add to a selection, then it's gonna have the little plus sign next to your lasso tool so you can start to add to this selection. And then, if you were to click here, you could subtract from your selection and will have the minus sign. Or while you're in this tool, you just hit the old key. You'll notice it, toggles it over there. So when I release the All Key goes back to the ad And when I hit the all key again, it goes to the subtract. So now I'm going to go to some of these problem areas and I'm gonna do a little modification. So, for instance, a tiny little corner here that we probably don't want so hit the subtract, used the old key. That's option on your Mac. And I'm just gonna draw little corner right there to connect it and see how that just takes care of that shadow. They will come around here. It looks like that one's actually probably okay, but we'll we'll make it a little better if you need to zoom in more to do this more accurately than you can draws carefully as I can resume did enough that this isn't going to need to be totally perfect. But you still want to do is good of the jobs you can and again impressing the Ault key before I start to draw just following the contour of these beans, lips, missus. Far it there. If you have ah island out there, then you can just draw around it like that. So you get everything a couple of spots right here. This is definitely worth taking your time on because the next step is going to be fast and easy. But if you've done a poor job of doing your selection, then the next step is gonna look kind of sloppy. Okay, so we're looking pretty good so far. We're gonna hit the space bar to go to our move tool and slide around the side. You could just follow the contours and see what needs help again. Hitting the altar or option key to subtract from the selection. Well, a little crazy there. It's OK. It's good. Looks good. And if for some reason I accidentally chopped way in here like this, I'm scared of that and I've cut off part of the beam. Then, without holding the out or option key, you can add to your selection. Just add that little piece back in, and you may need to just circle it out like that to close the whole thing. There we go, a couple more. And so this is an example of, ah, exercise that. I definitely want you to download this and practice. Okay, Space bar to slide around so you can just see what I'm doing here. Sometimes you this is Karen are betrayal spot. But we'll do like that. That's OK. Here's a really good one. That's a lot of shadow underneath there. Okay, space, far click and drag. There's a spot where we need to add part of that being back in. So we just scoop around there like that, a tiny little bit of the shadow. And you know what? I'll dio. I will leave one part of this shadow selected so that you could see what it would look like if we don't do it. Right. So I'm gonna slide over this one. This a good spire it here. Let's just select a whole chunk of shadow right there. I'm meant to do a circle close at him. Okay, so now we have some shadow selected right there. Actually, let's gotta clean this up a little bit. There we go. Yeah, I don't want that much, so I'm gonna like that. Okay, so we've got a little shadow accidentally selected there, so you can see what happens when we do these modifications? Yes. Let's go back to full screen. Well, it control zero now we have our selection. Now we're going to add an adjustment layer to change. Just thes coffee beans. Okay, in the way we do that as we just goto our adjustment layers click on it and we're gonna do a solid color. So this is kind of a new one for you. And you see, I'm already selected on green, so it just basically filled our entire area with green. So we have our color picker, and then we have a new adjustment layer. Except now things were a little bit different. Remember before we did a black and white layer and it gave you the little icon here. And then we didn't worry about the layer mask. We just left that blank because we were affecting our entire canvas. Well, now, because we have a selection active when we created our adjustment layer, it has turned that into a layer mask. So this is our mask, and it's masking off. Just this areas were on Lee doing our adjustment to what we've selected. And instead of bringing up the properties menu, the solid color adjustment layer brings up the color picker, so the green obviously doesn't work, So we're gonna go to crown of a purple, and it's gonna look weird at first, but you'll see how it's gonna work. We'll go, like right here somewhere. It doesn't actually totally matter. It was click OK, and then we have a couple of options. I talked briefly with you about blending modes and when it's on normal and that 100% capacity is just a blank screen. Oops, I just clicked over the linear burn. And so you can see that when I go to these different blending modes, it has a different effect for the way that you can see the image from underneath. And most of them aren't super great. But that's OK. But for instance, like it soft way even with it at 100% capacity, it's starting to look a little bit reasonable. So let's just go with soft white and then I'm going to reduce the opacity, and you can either click here and drag it down, or you can just click right here. You'll notice I get the little hand and it has these little arrows that you can barely see . But I just click right there and I just drag. I hold the mouse down and I could drag all the way down And if I go to zero, that's our original image. I go up to say 35 40% though it still looks pretty natural, partly because we have this blending mode and partly because we're making this adjustment layer transparent so you can sort of see through it. But you still get some of that color right, and we can look at different blending modes with that lower opacity because sometimes they look pretty good. But see these air kind of all washed out and kind of strange looking multiplies. Not terrible, but it definitely knocks out a lot of the highlights. But just to kind of give you an example and give you a little introduction to these things , that one's kind of got a antique look. It looks like it reminds me of an old fifties diner photo. There's a few different ones. That one's kind of interesting. Is that real rich brown to it? But we're gonna go with software Well, that would be kind of cool purple. Let's go with soft light, though, and then to see the changes in the effect that you've added, you just turn this off. OK, so after having added this kind of richness to it when we turn it off. Those coffee beans look kind of brown and dull, don't they? But when you do that, they look kind of more rich. And, you know, maybe I've gone too far, so subtle is always better. So we go down to, like, 27 will toggle back and forth there. So it's a subtle shift, but it really brings a lot of richness and color, especially with this really intense yellow background. You want these coffee beans, toe? Have some pop in some life, right? Okay. And you can sort of see along the edges. Things look pretty good where we did our selections Well, but if you continue to follow your eye around this corner and you get to this part right here and I'll zoom and so you can see you can see where I did that selection. And I left part of this shadow selected, and you notice how basically it looks like there's a stain in the shadow. It looks like a purple stain right, and if I increase the capacity, it's gonna get more and more significant. That's why it's important to do a good selection. Okay, But let's assume back out, and I'll show you one more cool trick. I'm getting a little head of myself because we're gonna talk about layer masks. Ah, whole bunch later. But if we wanted to fix this little guy right here, I could go into our layer mask. You double click on it, and it's going to go into this masking mode, and we could go get our lasso tool. Let's use your shortcuts at the l, and we're going to subtract from the selection. Right? So we're gonna head the old key. We're gonna go in here, and I'm not even zooming in. I'm just gonna do this really quick so you can see. Okay, So just removed that selection. Obviously, that's a little messy, but you can see that it improved it, and then you hit, okay? And we've taken that part up. Obviously, you'd want to get this corner and do it smoother and everything, but you see the ball. Okay, So that's how toe basically modify your selections and improve your selection so that when you make changes to an image, it's gonna look sharp and clean and professional. Okay, so go download this. Make yourself a copy of the layer. Do your selection, create an adjustment layer and then play around with colors. You can do different colors if you want, but that purple just happens to kind of suit the mood of this image. But you can play with different colors and different blending modes and a pass it ease and see what you can come up with. OK, make sure you post your final images or any other images that you play with with this assignment in the Q and A's so I could see him. And then we'll see in the next lecture where we're gonna talk Maura about layer masks and all of the magical things that you can do with layer masks. Thanks for watching.
6. Assignment #9 - Teeth Whitening: OK, in this video, we're going to look at teeth whitening and in the process will learn about adjustment layers and doing selections and a couple of other really cool little things. So first off, we're going to go up to file and I'm going to open recent and I'm just gonna go grab this lion with yellow teeth. Leave it as is click OK, and here we have this awesome little picture of a lion. And let's just say that this lioness rather vain and he is upset with how his teeth look in this image, and he's asked us to fix it for him. The first thing we're going to do is zoom in on this face and you can either use the zoom tool, just click on his face. Or you can alternately even drag square on this face and it will zoom right in like that or if we're zoomed out. Still, as you recall, you can hit the Ault on a PC option on the Mac, and it doesn't matter what Tulia on it will change to the zoom tool, and then you can use the roller on your mouse to scroll in like that since I have the hand tool, grab it and move him over. Okay? The next thing we're going to do is we're going to select his teeth and I keep calling this a him. I realize it's a girl. This is a lion s. So I apologize if I do that again and you can see that the upper teeth are quite a bit whiter than the lower teeth. So you could actually do this as two separate selections. But for this tutorial will just do them together because it will still improve them quite a bit. So first we need to actually select these teeth so we can go over here and pick a selection tool. And the ones I would recommend would be either the magnetic lasso tool. You could free hand, select it using the lasso tool. But it's a little bit more difficult. Or the quick selection tool for this one will just use the magnetic lasso tool. And I can kind of show you how that works. So you just started one corner click, and then as you drag along the edge, it's going to basically magnetically stick to the tooth. If you miss a little corner you can always. Or if it doesn't catch that there's a corner here. You can always click to create your own anchor point. We just let that go like that. We could do some clicking right there, and then we just follow this edge, and it automatically creates little anchor points for you. You can see that even if I die aggress a little bit over here, it's still kind of snaps to the white. And then it's a little trick here along the top because, as you can see, see, it wants to pull up, up above the gum line now. So do sit back space and click along the top of this a couple of times to make it go where I want to go. And then when I get back to the beginning, it does that little circle see right next to the magnet. And then I click, and that completes the selection that I can a shift key, and I can add to the selection down here and again. I'm just clicking the anchor on spots where I think it might go awry and then letting it do the rest of the work. When I get to the beginning. Click it and we have. Now we have two selections here which are essentially the same selection. And you can always double check this finding to zoom in here. We'll hit the alky again and hit the space bar to do this hand tool and then move this. You can see I missed a spot along here. I can actually go in with the regular lasso tool. And I could just add these spots in like that. So you have that completes it, clear that edge that edge. And if there's a part that you wanna remove from your selection like, say, this little purple spot in between, you can hit the all turkey, and your plus is gonna change to a minus next to the lasso. And then I can just select out a little section of that, see how that removes it from the selection. And actually, I would probably do that along here is well and then get rid of that. There we go. That's looking better. Now I'm gonna hit all and zoom back out and space part of grab the hand and center everything again and you can get is detailed as you want with that, it doesn't have to be super, super accurate. You just have to be careful, because we are gonna lighten this these areas. And you wouldn't want part of this lip selected, because then you're gonna lighten this lips, and that wouldn't be good. Okay, so now we're gonna go down here, and we're going to create a new layer, a new adjustment layer based on this selection that we have and the adjustment layer is right here, I hover over that. You'll see it says, create new Phil or adjustment layer, and I just click on it. It gives me a menu, and there are a lot of things you can work with. Here you can see the like a solid fill color a Caridi in color, brightness and contrast if you have increased the lightness or darkness. But we're gonna work with hue and saturation since we want to take the yellow out of this. And it will also allow us to lighten it a swell. So we're gonna click that you'll notice a few things happened. First, it brought up our properties panel for hue and saturation here, and we'll get into these dials in just a minute, but you'll notice it also brought up a new layer. So we were working on our background layer, but it created new adjustment layer and this little icon you'll notice matches this like on where we created the adjustment layer. So we know that this layer is an adjustment layer, and then it also created a layer mask, which we haven't talked about yet. But where we selected these teeth and then create a new layer. Based on that selection, it has essentially masked off those teeth. And you can even see if you can look closely enough that they're two little white spots here, and this is where we made the selection on the teeth. So the only part that selected is the white area on this little mask at all. The black area will not be affected by the changes that we make, and that's really significant because we're only gonna whiten these teeth right, and I'll be able to better explain this as we go into this panel and change the properties . So we basically have three main adjustments here. We can change the hue, which is the actual color and I'm just gonna slide these so you can see what happens if I change the hue. See how it either adds or removes color from it. So here they're turning really green, blue, green and kind of warms. And then they turned purple back to blue again. So we're not gonna mess with Hugh. It was set that back to zero. But we are going toe adjust the saturation and lightness. So who is the actual color of the rainbow? Right? Saturation is the amount of color in the image. So if we reduce the saturation and note that and keep in mind, we're only working with the teeth here. But notice how, if I go all the way to the bottom here than the teeth become black and white and if I go all the way to the top here, then they're gonna become really intense colors. So the reds get redder, the yellows get more yellow and so on. But I have noticed that when I make these changes, its Onley affecting the teeth which are selected in this layer mask, okay. And then third of all, we're going to it just the lightness and it's the same thing with whiteness for go really dark. It's gonna make the teeth black. They go way up, it's going to make the teeth just burnt out. White. Okay, so I'm going to set these all back to zero for the moment. And then up here we have We have some presets which we're not going to even get into. But you also have your specific range selection here so you can select the master, which is all the colors where you can select specific colors reds, yellows, greens, scions, blues or magenta. As in this case, we're trying to adjust the yellows because the teeth are yellow. So we're going to select that. And now if we go into the saturation and we drop it all the way down again, we pull all the yellows out. If we go big, it's gonna make him really yellow. So this is where we're able to just take out the yellows in this image. Cool, right? So I'm going to drop down the yellows a bit here and one thing to remember is subtle is better. So you don't want to make major changes to think if I go all the way down to here. They're gonna look really gray and kind of lifeless and unhealthy. So we're just going down a little bit, Will Goto like, minus 20 here, and then I'm going to you know? So now they're kind of a little bit boy and looking, so we're gonna go increase the lightness, which is just gonna brighten them up and again, We're not going to go to crazy, and then you'll notice there's a little icon down here and I can hide what I've just done or show it. I think I'll do more on the saturation and a little bit more on the lightness. This is a very vain line, and she really wants her teeth to look good. Now, I can do that kind of preview. Okay, So, see, when I click there, you can definitely see the yellows in here. And when I talk about it back on, definitely. It's brightening up. Watch this one click on my eyeball. Here. See that change? See at Brighton's and same with these seat. They mostly go become less yellow, okay? And I'm a bright and I'm just a tiny bit more. Oops. Gotta have a toggled on. Okay. And We'll talk all that back and forth again. Sometimes it helps to zoom out. I hope so. I just hit the wrong button. Hopefully, don't mess that up. I think it's the same as what I had here. Let's close this for a second and we'll zoom out. So we hit Ault again and scroll out. And now I can use the eyeball over here to hide this layer so we can just kind of see the difference. So this is what the changes that we've made. This is without the changes you can definitely see. The yellow is kind of coming back into the teeth. And there we are again with the changes, and they're this before changes and after the changes, so you can see it's subtle, but it basically just looks like this guy had a good teeth whitening before he posed for the photo or she I guess I should say We'll call her the lioness and that's it. That's how you do a selection and whiten a specific area such as your subject's teeth and just a little recap of what we did. We first were selected on the background. We used some selection tools to select an area, so we selected an area. Then we went down and we clicked on new adjustment layer and we clicked on hue and saturation. It brought up this new panel for us, and it created new adjustment layer. And by the way, this is a better visualization. You can see where I selected that bigger area around the mouth. Now you can really see it in the layer mask here that I have that selected and you'll notice I can do adjustments on this layer or on the layer that I created previously and just to kind of show you while we're in here. I go to this and I play with lightness. See how it's gonna just the lightness of that area that I just selected. And this also shows you how. If I wanted to do just the upper teeth on the first adjustment layer and then go back and select the lower teeth for the second adjustment layer and maybe whitened these a little bit more than the upper teeth, then you could do it that way as well. Now where I don't need that disclose that where I don't need this selection in this adjustment layer. I can grab it and drag it down to the trashcan right here and let go, and it's gone. So that's our adjusted layer that start before with kind of mother of pearl colored teeth. And that's the vanity shot, the white shiny teeth.
7. How to Save Your Selections: hi and welcome back in this video, I'm going to show you how to save and load selections. So in other words, you can create a selection and you can actually save it in photo shop and then later on in your project, instead of having to re select it, especially if it's something really complex. You can just load the selection back in here and do your thing. OK, so as an example, let's take this soccer ball. Let's say we wanted to select this soccer ball so we could either change the color of it or cut it out and drop it into another image or whatever the reason is, let's save it. So it's ready for us later. And obviously, this is a very simple example. But it's easier to learn on a simple example so that you can then go and use the techniques on more complicated examples. As you go, I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in. Let's see, there's, um, Holt. There we go. You zoom in and I'm going to grab my magic wand tool, the w key, and I'm gonna make it bigger with square brackets, and we'll just start clicking and dragging around the soccer ball. Pretty simple selection. A couple of these corners, corners, edges round things don't have corners. And then if you remember to get rid of selections, you hit the cult key or you can actually go up here and click here to do Subtract. Now you're permanently in the old key and do that. But I don't like that. I like to stay in the plus and then just use the old key to work back and forth. So I'm gonna take out some of the selection here working carefully. It's a little trickier where it's dark because it's not 100% sure where the edge of the ball issue keep having to tell it until it really gets it figured out something like that. Okay. And I've noticed I missed a couple spots. I'm gonna jump back in there and get those. Okay, now we have a decent selection. You could refine this, but we're just doing the quick and dirty for the example. So you have your selection saved. You go to the select menu, go down here and say, save selection. It shows you the document that you're in. Don't worry about the channel. You can leave that on the default for new and you just name it and we'll just name this soccer bowl and click, OK, And now your selection is saved. And as you recall, if you hit control or command and the letter D for D Select, you can diesel ect that. And now if we were in an emergency and we need to get that selection back, we could go to select and re select, and we would get it back. But if we have de selected this control D and we've done a 1,000,000 other things too, this image or in this file and then we want to get back to that selection we've done. We've already done a bunch of different selections. You can't just control Z and undo everything that you've done. So since we've saved that selection, we can go back up to select and load selection. It's gonna show us our document. There's also a drop down if you need to grab a selection from another file. But this is going to default to this image, and that also defaults to our soccer ball name and then we just click OK and Presto, it pops that selection back end and we're ready to go. Okay, So as you progress and get better at photo shop and you start to do Mawr complex selections , this is gonna become really nice because you can save yourself a lot of heartache so that you don't accidentally get rid of your selection or move on with lots of steps that you can't go back but you, so you just save it and then you'll have it for when you need it. Okay. Oh, and one thing that's very much worth noting is that once you have saved your selection in here, you want to do a save as and save it as a PSD file, a photo shop document so that it will save your selection. If I do that selection and save it and then I close this out and don't save it, then that selection will be gone. So do yourself a favor. Hit control or command s. It shows the Photoshopped document here a PSD file, click, save. And then when you come back and open this again, your PSD file will have your saved selection in there and you'll be good to go. Okay,
Steve McDonald, Excel and Photoshop Geek
