SELECTIONS FOR DIGITIZERS
Presentation by Fritz Schafer 11/13/07
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Like many other tools in P/S there are many ways to make selections.  Many times selections are easy.  Sometimes they are difficult and time consuming.  Sometimes they are impossible but most of the time they can be made.

I’m going to some of the selection tools going from the fundamentals to the more advanced.  One of the main reasons for making a selection is to create a mask.  I’m just going to talk about selections.  But you should be aware that if you have a selection active and create a new adjustment layer you will have created a mask for that adjustment layer.  Changes made by that adjustment layer will only apply to areas within the selection which is now the area that has not been masked.

So let’s start at the beginning with a rectangular selection.

- Image – blue door.
- Choose rectangular Marquee Tool.
- Click and drag to make a rectangular selection.
- CTL-D to de-select.
- Hold down the space bar to move a selection while creating it.
- To add to a selection either: a) hold down the Shift key or b) look at the tool bar at the top of the screen and click on the double squares that are overlapping and are the same shade.
- To subtract from a selection either: a) hold down the ALT (Option on Mac) key or b) look at the tool bar at the top of the screen and click on the double squares that are overlapping and are different shades.
- To move a selection after you have created it, choose a selection tool, making sure that the single square option (new selection) is chosen in the tool bar at the top of the screen.  Click and drag inside the selection.
- OK.  That’s pretty basic.  We can make a selection, we can add to it, and we can subtract from it, and we can move the selection.  These techniques hold true for all selections.
- How about transforming a selection?  You would think that after you make a selection you would choose Edit> Transform.  Let’s try that.
It moves the pixels!  Not what we had in mind.  To transform a selection choose Select > Transform Selection.
Then right click (Mac – Control Click) and pick your option.  In this case let’s choose Distort.  We can then move the edges around to make a better selection of the door.
Now let’s talk about another important aspect of selections: feathering.  I’m going to talk about this using the Refine Edge option that is new in CS3.  The feathering option is available in previous versions of Photoshop but you couldn’t always easily see the effect.  This is a way cool option and lets you see what the selection look like.

- Let’s make a selection of the door again.  This time we’ll use a selection tool that is more suited to this object.
- Select the Polygonal Lasso Tool.
- Select the door by clicking on each of the four corners in turn and then select the first corner again.  You can see that even though the door’s sides are not perfectly parallel, we can still make an excellent selection.
- Zoom out to 200%.
- Pick Select > Refine Edge
- Click on Default.  I haven’t played around with this a lot yet but the default works pretty well a lot of the time.  You can see that we can click at the bottom of the page to see the selection with different backgrounds so that the selected object stands out better from the background.  Pick the one that works best for the image you are working with.  We’re going to stay with the white background as we adjust the various sliders.
I’m going to tell you what Ben Willmore has to say about each option.  This gives you a guide as to what to do.  But the best thing is to adjust it and see if it helps or not.  Incidentally I highly recommend his new book “Up to Speed in Photoshop CS3”.  It focuses exclusively on the new features in CS3.  No use buying a book that covers material you already have a book on.
Radius:  Use higher settings on complex or soft edged objects.  As you can see as we increase the radius the edge becomes softer.  Not what we want for this hard edged object.  So let’s go back to the default of 1.0.
Contrast:  If you use a high number for radius you might have to increase the contrast so that the edge isn’t too soft.  As you can see as we increase the contrast we increase the hardness of the edge.  Usually you want a softer edge so the selection blends in with the background.  In this case I’d leave contrast at 0.
Smooth:  This rounds sharp corners and makes the selection outline smooth.  We don’t want round corners here so we will not change it.  Just leave it at the default of 3.  You can see the corners become rounded as we increase the smoothness.
Feather:  This option we are all used to although now we can easily see the effect on the selection.  It generally softens the edge of the selection.  Most selections need to be feathered.  Your choice here.  Generally keep it low.
Contrast/Expand:  As the names imply you can use this to contract or expand the selection.  I don’t know why you would ever use this.  Make the selection correct in the first place.
At the bottom of the menu we can choose various preview modes as follows: Standard mode, Quick Mask Mode, On Black Mode, On White Mode, and Mask Mode.  These are useful depending on the background colors of the image.

OK, let’s accept the selection and reduce the saturation using the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.  Looks pretty good.

Now we know how to make a basic selection, add to it, subtract from it, move it, transform it and refine the edge.
Let’s look at some of the selection tools themselves.
First pick the Lasso Tool.  In some ways this is a pretty useless tool except for one very cool trick that Terry Abrams taught us in class.  This is very simple but very effective.

I’m going to work on the dog plate picture here.  Suppose we wanted to lighten up the plate.  We could make a very careful and a bit time consuming selection of the plate and then use levels.  But what about this.  Make a rough selection of the plate, bring up a Levels adjustment layer, adjust levels to way you want increased lightness and then make some adjustments to the mask to perfect it.

Isn’t that cool?  One of the advantages of taking classes – you learn useful stuff.

 

And this is where the session ended due to time constraints.  What was not covered in the demo is as follows.

Another selection tool is the Magnetic Lasso.  The options I start with are New Selection, Width 10, Contrast 10.  If the edge you are selecting you can use a high contrast number and high width.  Just experiment.
After making a selection with the Magnetic Lasso we can go to quick mask mode and refine it.  Use a white brush to add to the SELECTION (erases red) or a black brush to subtract from the selection.  Go into levels and see how your selection looks.
Another cool selection tool is the Quick Selection tool which is new to PS CS3.  I understand that it has been in Photoshop Elements.  Let’s look at this with the Blue Door pic.
- Magic Wand tool – Village Pharmacy Pic, Green Maple Village Sign.  Options, Contiguous, Tolerance 32
- Color Range Tool – same pic, Color Red
- First use eyedropper to pick the red in the Village Pharmacy sign.
- Select > Color Range, Fuzziness about 103
- Use Lasso Tool to delete unwanted areas in the lower part of the pic.
-Use Color Balance to change the color.

IF TIME PERMITS:
Use dog picture.  Use the Extract Filter to select complex objects.
- Copy the background layer.
- Add a new layer between the background layer and the copy of the background.
- Edit > Fill with a color that contrasts with the dog’s fur.  Using this in place of a new photo to put the dog into.
- Filter > Extract
  Brush size 50
  Show Highlight
  Show Fill
- > Bucket to fill inside of dog.
- > Preview
- > OK

That’s All Folks!