Adobe Photoshop - Using the Selection Tool

You may have heard of selections, but you may not know exactly what they do. A selection is a way to isolate part of an image. So, you can make adjustments to that part, or work on only that area. Once you've made a selection only the selected area will be impacted by your edits. Whether those involve making an image adjustment, applying a filter, painting or lots more. In this video, we'll cover some basics about working with selections. You can follow along with this image from the practice files for this tutorial. Let's jump right in and make a selection. We're not focusing on selection tools in this video. So, let's just use the first selection tool in the Tools panel. Which is the Rectangular Marquee tool. This tool is used to make rectangular and square shaped selections. Click on that tool and then move into the image and start at the upper left corner of this building and click and drag out a rectangular selection of part of the building and include the parking lot below too. The animated lines you see represent the edge of the selection. They're sometimes called 'marching ants'. If you were to do something to the image now like make an adjustment it would appear only inside the area defined by the 'marching ants'. Before we do that take a look at the Options bar for this selection tool. There you'll find an icon for Adding to a selection and one for Subtracting from a selection. You'll use these often and you'll find them in the Options bar for many of the selection tools. Let's say we want to Add to our selection to include the entire building. Click the Add to Selection option in the Options bar and then come into the image and click inside the top right corner of the existing selection and drag to encompass more of the building and the parking lot too. If you don't get it all you can come in and Add to the little bit that you didn't get the first time. Now, let's say that you go too far - like this. How do you subtract from a selection? For that, go up to the Options bar and click on the next icon the Subtract from selection icon here. Then come into the image and click and drag around the area that you want to remove from the selection. I'm also going to subtract a little from the selection down here to remove the parking lot. So, now that we have the building selected let's make an adjustment and you'll see that your adjustment affects just the area inside the 'marching ants'. Let's go up to the Image menu and choose Adjustments and we'll use a Brightness/Contrast... adjustment. Which we covered in more detail in an earlier tutorial in this series. In the Brightness/Contrast dialog box drag the Brightness slider way over to the left. To darken the building. And drag the Contrast slider to the right to increase contrast. And click OK. As you can see that change is affecting only the area inside the 'marching ants'. Let's say you wanted to make a different Brightness/Contrast adjustment to affect everything, except the building. In that case you wouldn't have to start again creating a new selection. Instead - you can invert this selection to select everything, except the building. To do that, go up to the Select Menu and choose Inverse. With this selection active, let's go to the Image menu and choose Adjustments, Brightness/Contrast. And this time, let's increase the Brightness. And click OK. Finally, when you're finished with a selection it's important to deselect. So that the next thing you do to the image isn't limited by the selection. To do that, go to the Select menu and choose Deselect. Or, you could use the keyboard shortcut Command + D, or Ctrl + D on Windows. It's one to remember because you'll use it often. When you save this image go to File, Save As... and save it with a different name. So, you don't save over the original. So those are the basics of selections. But there's lots more to learn about making and working with selections. So, stay tuned for the rest of the videos in this tutorial. 

There are quite a few selection tools and methods. You don't need to master all of them when you're just getting started with Photoshop CC. Let's get familiar with a couple of selection tools you'll probably use often. The Quick Selection tool and the Lasso tool. You can give them a try on this image from the practice files for this tutorial or on an image of your own. If you're working on an image with multiple layers first check the Layers panel. To make sure the layer with the content you want to select is highlighted there. Go to the Tools panel and click on the Quick Selection tool. This tool can detect edges of objects based on color and tone. So, it will do a lot of the selecting work for you. Let's say that we want to select the mannequin so that we can apply an adjustment to it. Click hold and drag across part of the mannequin and Photoshop CC automatically selects - at least part of it. Stopping where it sees an edge. Don't worry if you don't get the whole mannequin on the first stroke. As soon as you make the first stroke with this tool the tool sets itself to the Add To Selection option. So, you can just continue to click and drag over other areas that you want to add to the selection. If the tool selects too much like this area of the background hold down the Option key or the ALT key on Windows and click and drag over that area to remove that part from the selection. As soon as you release your finger from the mouse or the trackpad the Quick Selection tool goes back to the Add To Selection mode. So, you can drag over any other areas you want to include in the selection. Like this area up here. Alternatively, you could go to the Options bar and click on the Plus and Minus options there. But it really does make more sense to use the shortcut with this tool. One reason is that you may have to go back and forth a few times. As in this area here where there's not much contrast between the background and the mannequin. So, with my finger off the mouse I'll add to the selection by dragging along this edge. And then, I'll hold the Option or ALT key. And I'll subtract from the selection I'll release my finger and I'll add to the selection again. And I might have to subtract one more time. Fortunately, this tool learns as you work so you may have to give it just a few tries subtracting from and adding to a difficult edge to select it. Another useful tool in a situation like this is the Lasso tool. A selection tool that makes free form selections. It's located over here in the Tools panel. Go ahead and click on it now. The Lasso tool often comes in handy to manually clean up selections made with another tool. And yes, you can use more than one selection tool to complete a selection. The first thing we need to do is go up to the Options bar for the Lasso tool and switch it from its default to its Add To Selection option. Otherwise, if we were to click with this tool at its default setting we might lose our entire initial selection. If that does happen to you just use the Undo or Step Backward commands to try to get your selection back. So, I'll click on the Add To Selection option and then I'll move into the image. And here I see a small area that I didn't manage to get with the Quick Selection tool. I'm going to carefully click and drag along the edge and then around and back to the beginning to include that area in my selection. You can also subtract from a selection with the Lasso tool. To do that, go back up to the Options bar and click the Subtract From Selection icon. Then I'll move into the image and here I want to remove this small area. So, I'll carefully move along the edge all the way around and back to the beginning. So, with this selection I'm going to apply an adjustment. I'll go up to the Image menu and I'll choose Adjustments and Brightness/Contrast... and in the Brightness/Contrast dialog box I'll drag the Brightness slider over to the right to brighten just the area that we'd selected - the mannequin. And I'll click OK to accept that. Finally go to the Select menu and choose Deselect or use the keyboard shortcut Command + D on the Mac or Ctrl + D on Windows. If you want to save a copy of this image without saving over the original use the Save As... command from the File menu. As we've been doing throughout the tutorial series. So that's an introduction to 2 very useful selection tools. The Lasso tool and the Quick Selection tool.

When you're comfortable making selections you may want to take things a step further. By viewing and fine-tuning a selection in the special Select and Mask... workspace. Give it a try with this image from the tutorial practice files. Start by making an initial selection of this jacket. You can do that here in Photoshop's CC main interface or in the Select and Mask... workspace that we'll visit in a minute. We're going to do it here in the main interface using the Quick Selection tool which you already learned how to do, in an earlier video in this tutorial. So, click on the Quick Selection tool and then move into the image and click and drag over the jacket. On this side, and then on this side too. And if your tool selects the area in the middle hold down the Option key. - that's the ALT key on Windows. And click and drag there, to remove that area from the selection. I'll release my finger from the mouse and the tool automatically switches back to Add To Selection mode. And I'll come up to the shoulder and click and drag over this extra bit that I'd missed. to add that into the selection too. Now go to the Options bar and click Select and Mask... or go up to the Select menu and you can choose Select and Mask... from here. No matter which selection tool you have selected. That opens a separate workspace. The Select and Mask... workspace. Start here, by going to the right side of the workspace and clicking the View menu icon to open this menu of different ways to view the current selection. Depending on the image you're using you'll find that different views give you the most accurate information about what could be improved in your initial selection. For example, let's click on this Overlay (V) view. This view is showing us everything that's outside the selection with a transparent red overlay. So, we can more clearly see that the initial selection isn't exactly true to the edge of the jacket. There are parts of the jacket that had been left out of the selection. And there's a little bit of the background that's included in the selection - that shouldn't be. Like this area here on the bottom right. To try to fix that we'll use one of the tools over here in the Abbreviated Tools panel. Here you'll find some of the same tools as in the main Photoshop CC interface. And they work the same way here too. For example, there's a Quick Selection tool, a Lasso tool, a Hand tool for panning and a Zoom tool for zooming. Go ahead and select the third tool from the top. This is a Brush tool that lets you simply paint to add to or subtract from the selection. Move in to the image and simply paint over an area like this part right here that's covered in red. And as you see, that area becomes clear as I paint over it. I'll do the same up here. And over here. Now if I want to remove something from the selection like down here. I'll go up to the Options bar for this Brush tool and click on the Minus symbol. And then I'll come over here and I'll paint. Now as you're painting you may want to use the Zoom tool to zoom in for a closer view. I'm just going to paint like this quickly. I'll go back up to the Options bar and I'll switch back to the Add To selection and I'll add in a little bit that I missed right over here. Of course, there are lots of other controls in the Select and Mask... workspace. As you can see. And you can explore those as you become more familiar with Photoshop CC. But this introduction will get you started with basic Select and Mask... features, like the View menu and a couple of the tools over on the left. Now before you close the Select and Mask... workspace you need to choose how you would like to output your improved selection. So, go over to the right side and if you need to click the Scroll bar there and scroll down until you see a menu labeled Output Settings. Click the arrow on that menu. I'm going to scroll down again and choose from the Output To menu and I'm going to choose to output with the first default option Selection. And that will tell Photoshop CC to output the improved selection in the view you're used to - the 'marching ants' view. Then, click OK to close the Select and Mask... workspace and go back to the main interface with the improved selection that appears as 'marching ants'. As you know, anything you do to the image now will affect only the area inside the selection. The jacket. So, let's do something we've done in earlier tutorials in this series. Add a Brightness/Contrast... adjustment. I'll go up to the Image menu Adjustments Brightness/Contrast... and in the Brightness/Contrast dialog box I'll drag this Brightness slider over to the right. Brightening the jacket. And then I'll click OK. Finally, I'll deselect by pressing Command + D on a Mac or Ctrl + D on Windows. Or you can go to the Select menu and choose Deselect. And if you want a copy of this image with this adjustment without saving over the original, use the Save As... command as we've done throughout this tutorial series. So that's a brief introduction to how to view and fine-tune a selection using just some of the features in the Select and Mask... workspace.