PhotoShop Advanced Selections

 

Making accurate selections is the most important thing you can do in PhotoShop. You can edit an image beautifully, but if your selection is bad, nothing will ever look good. Because making selections with tools like the lasso can sometimes take a long time, in this section of the web design course well learn how to save our selection so we can use it later. Were also going to learn a selection editing technique called Quick Masks. Quick masks will help you have perfect selections.

Save Selections

Sometimes youll spend half an hour (or more) making an accurate selection. Its a real bummer if you need that same selection again in a couple of hours or the next day. Instead of making the whole selection again, you can save any selection for later use.

Saving a selection is easy:

1. Make a selection
2. Click SELECT-> SAVE SELECTION
3. Name the selection

4. Click OK

 

To Load a Saved Selection

1. Click SELECT-> LOAD SELECTION
2. Choose the desired selection from the Channel pull-down menu.
3. Click OK

 

Quick Masks

When youre painting in your house, you use masking tape to protect areas you dont want to paint. PhotoShop allows you to mask areas of your images, too. You wont be able to do anything to the masked areas. The mask is very easily edited. To remove parts of a mask, youll erase it with the eraser tool. To add to a mask, youll paint it with the paintbrush. You can use a fuzzy brush when you want a soft selection for hair, and a hard brush when making a hard selection for a jacket. Using the eraser and the paintbrush to edit selections sure is a whole lot easier than trying to hold ALT and circle selections with the lasso.

The quick mask feature is mostly used only to edit, or fine tune, selections. You arent going to make whole selections in Quick Mask Mode. Youll make whole selections with the normal selection tools (the lasso, the magic wand) and youll perfect those selections by adding to or trimming them in Quick Mask Mode.

 

To Use Quick Masks

1.      Make a selection in an image.

2.     Make sure that your foreground and background colors are pure black and white.

Its really, really, really important that the foreground and background color are black and white. The quick mask tool works by painting and erasing.

 

3.      On the Toolbox, click the Quick Mask Button

 

Anything that wasnt selected will turn red, signifying a mask. Remember, just like masking tape, you wont be able to affect the red masked area.

 

4.      Zoom in and erase mask with the Eraser Tool or paint new mask with the Paintbrush Tool. Dont use any selection tools (like the lasso) in mask mode.

Remember that anything not masked will be editable later.

5.      When youre ready, click back into standard mode.
All image editing is done in standard mode. Youll be switching back and forth between Mask Mode and Standard Mode.

 

 

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