From the course: Learning Photoshop Compositing

Selection tool overview - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Learning Photoshop Compositing

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Selection tool overview

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- [Instructor] Before we get going with the projects here's a quick recap on the selection tools. So we have our marquee selections to make elliptical or rectangular selections, which you can thereafter tweak in a number of ways. One of which is to use transform selection. We have lasso tools maybe we want to select the straight sides of an object. If I held down my alt key I can toggle to the other behavior of the tool. But typically these tools are best when you just need to quickly and roughly isolate a broad area. With the quick selection tool you can change the size of its brush and then just drag over an area to build up a selection. With the magic wand tool, you can select pixels that are like the area that you click on. When you're in any of these three selection tools you also have access to select subject. Now, this is so good that I tend to use this as my go-to for making an initial selection especially when used in the cloud behavior. And to make this your default come to image processing takes a little bit longer but it's worth it. The Object Selection Tool uses the same AI technology. It identifies objects in the scene. Now you can either have it identify all objects or just mouse over individual objects and then click to make that into a selection. It's very important that you know your intent. Some projects require a detailed pain staking selection but with others you can get what you want with a single click. And sometimes the best selection is no selection at all but rather to target parts of the image with blending modes or identifying them by tone or color. If you're working with a manmade object or if you just want a hard edge the pen tool is your best option. A typical workflow is to make a basic selection with whatever selection tool or combination of tools works best. And then to refine this in Select and Mask you can view the selection in progress on a variety of backgrounds. And if you press the F key that will toggle through your different viewing options. For fine edge selections like hair or fur you can use the refined hair option. I'm just going to switch to Object Aware before I do that as well as the refined edge tool to finesse the selections for less delicate selections. Use the edge detection options. These are some of the selection techniques that I'll be using combining and expanding upon.

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