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I would now like to talk about how you can make good selections in Photoshop.
When I say good selections, I am referring to a selection that can be made quickly and
easily. Now there is really no bad selection, but
you certainly don't want to spend all day making a selection,
just so you can edit a specific portion of an image.
So what I would like to do throughout this chapter is show you a couple of different
tips of how you can use different tools to select the items that you want to quickly
and easily. I am going to go ahead and double-click on
the Chapter 4 folder here in Bridge, and I am going to go into the brushes in Quick
Mask Mode. That's the first topic we are going to cover.
I am going to double-click the eyes.TIF image. This is actually a stock image that I was
able to graciously use from photospin.com. If you are interested in images like this
you might want to visit photospin.com, they have lots of wonderful images
that you can use in your layouts and in your graphics.
And despite this being a great image, what I would like to do is actually change the
eye color. OK, I would like to change the color that's
currently applied to these eyes here. OK, this is her natural color, I am assuming.
It might have been doctored up bit, but I want to doctor it some more.
So I want to change these eyes to be a slightly more blue rather than green, OK.
So one way to do that is to select just the eyes and then make a change using a Hue and
Saturation Adjustment layer. Unfortunately, there is no Selection Brush
tool here in Photoshop CS3, like there is in a Photoshop Elements.
It's one of the tools in Elements that I still like.
Although Photoshop Elements is considered to be more of a consumer level product,
there are some really great tools in it and that happens to be one of them.
So of course I don't have it here in Photoshop, but what I can do is actually use a regular
brush and make my selection using Quick Mask Mode.
OK so Quick Mask Mode allows you to actually paint within the area with a brush in order
to mask out certain areas and select the area surrounding
it. OK, what we can do is select the eyes in Quick
Mask Mode and then inverse our selection that was created that way in order to get
just the eyes. OK, so I'll show you how to do this.
First thing I want to do is enter Quick Mask Mode and the way to that is to click this
little button down here at the bottom of the Tools palette.
You can click or you can press the letter Q in your keyboard,
which is the one letter keyboard shortcut to enter Quick Mask Mode.
Go ahead and press that and now what I would like to do is I am going to bring black to
my foreground color, press X to bring that to the front and with
my Brush tool selected and if you don't already have it selected,
you can press B on your keyboard in order to access that tool quickly and easily.
We'll go up here in to the Tools palette. I am going to choose a brush, right now I
have a 19 pixel hard brush selected, but I think I am going to work with a soft
brush instead. And this is kind of, sort of a soft image.
I am going to choose a 300 pixel soft brush. Notice that the Hardness is now down to zero.
And that looks good to me, I am actually- I am going to turn off the Airbrush function
and leave the Opacity and the Flow both set to 100%.
And then as I paint in here I am currently using a graphics pen and tablet.
So I have a little bit of pressure sensitivity going on.
So I am going to actually press lightly and then sort of make little circles that go out,
OK. Now if you are doing this with a mouse it
may behave a little bit differently but that's OK.
You are still making a selection and wherever you click and drag you are going
to see this red area appear and that is your mask, OK.
I am going to click over here again, lightly at first and then pressing little harder and
making some circular motions to select the eye and now we have both of
our eyes covered in Quick Mask Mode. You can see the red, so that's some serious
red eye, right. But this is a red eye that we actually can
use, OK. That's not going to stay this way because this is just the mask that we are
viewing. Alright, so now I want to exit Quick Mask
Mode and a way to do that is again to click this button
or again press Q. Alright, so now we are seeing the marching ants.
So here is the selection that we made when we painted inside the Quick Mask Mode
and notice that it's everything surrounding the two eyes.
So what I want to do is Inverse the selection and that can be done by using Select,
Inverse or using this keyboard shortcut which I use all the time, Command+Shift+I or Ctrl+Shift+I
in Windows and now we have our eyes selected. The next thing I want to do is actually change
a few things about the selection by accessing the Refine Edge dialog box,
OK. And one way we can do that is by pressing Command+Option+R or Ctrl+Alt+R.
I currently have my Preview set up here. So that it's previewing selection over a white
background, which I kind of like, because I am actually focusing
in on what the edge is going to look like and that's what we are focusing on, right
with the edge, we want to change the edge. I have Contrast actually turned up, that's
actually how I want it. Normally, I would zero all these out, like
this, and then start applying the changes that I want to make.
Notice it's a really soft selection. See the edge there that's because we were
using a really soft brush and using pressure sensitivity with this graphics pen.
So we want to harden it up a little bit. We don't want to be super hard either because
it's sort of a soft image. OK. So I am hardening it up a bit by increasing
that contrast little further than it was when we originally opened the dialog box.
And I might expand it out a little bit too, so it looks like there is a little bit more
area there that I didn't quite cover with that soft edge
brush. It's starting to look- now we're creeping
a little bit into the white of the eye there, so maybe bring it back down just a little
bit. That's looking pretty good.
I am going to click OK, we have now adjusted our edge and that's going to effect the adjustment
that we are going to apply here. I am going to change the color.
I am going to go into my Layers palette, click on the icon to display that palette and fly
it out. I really like working this way with all of
my palettes; minimizing the docks then I can just access them when I need them
and in the meantime focus on editing my image; keeps everything out of the way, it's really
great. OK, so I am going to add a Hue and Saturation
Adjustment layer down here by choosing it from the bottom Adjustment layer icon.
Bring that up, that's going to bring up the dialog box.
I can still see the image in the background so as I make my change, notice what happened,
it took my selection and applied it to a layer mask.
So white reveals and black conceals, which means that the areas that are white within
this mask, which are the eyes, are going to be affected by the adjustment and that's
what we are going to do. Move the Hue slider and see as we do that
we can make her eyes more blue. OK, now sort of reacting a little strange
with some of the other deeper colors that are in the original eye.
So if we want to we can sort of tint these eyes by choosing the Colorize option and then
moving the Hue slider up this way a bit until more of the blue territory.
That's a way too saturated, too vibrant, so I am going to bring the Saturation
down to make it more lifelike; something like this.
And then we can click our Preview on and off to go from green to blue.
Green to blue. OK, so we have it looking a little bit more like we wanted to.
OK, green to blue. Click OK and we have applied our adjustment.
Now if we want to keep a little bit of that color that was
in the center there what we can do is paint again in our Mask using our brush, OK.
So I can go ahead, reduce the size of my brush by either changing the settings up in here,
changing the Diameter settings, but a lot of times what I'll do when I am
working with brushes, I'll change the brush size on the fly by using the bracket keys.
Left Bracket makes it smaller and the Right Bracket makes it bigger, like so.
So I am going to make it kind of small, maybe press X to bring black as the foreground color.
You notice these changed over here, black is on the foreground color and I am going
to change my Opacity. I can use my scrubby to just bring this way
down or I can just type in a number. So let's say I want it to be 20%, I'll type
in two. I now have the Brush set to 20%, and that
way I don't have to mess with any controls up here, just use keyboard shortcuts.
And now I can just start to paint in here. Painting in some black, adding strokes as
I go and that's going to start to bring in some
of that original color in here that we had as you can see.
To make it a little bit more lifelike, maybe bring up the Opacity a little bit more. I
will go up to 40% and then press a little harder on the tablet
to get in there and make this a little bit more lifelike.
You can do the same thing over here, adding some of that color back in,
OK just a little bit, it doesn't have to be perfect you know.
OK, so now we have her eyes, the color has been changed.
It's looking really good and we did so by making that selection quickly and easily using
brushes in Quick Mask Mode.