Master the art of digital manipulation by learning how to use selection tools effectively in Photoshop. This tutorial provides a comprehensive guide on how to accurately select and remove specific parts of an image, particularly focusing on the lasso tool, polygonal lasso tool, magnetic lasso tool, quick selection tool, and the magic wand tool.
Key Insights
- The lasso tool in Photoshop provides freehand capability to create selections. Feathering can be adjusted to change the sharpness of the selected area's edges.
- The polygonal lasso tool allows the creation of polygonal selections by clicking to create new points for the polygon. This tool can be particularly useful for selecting specific shapes, but may not be as effective for selections with rounded corners.
- The magic wand tool samples the color that is clicked and creates a selection of pixels of similar color within a set tolerance. This tool is ideal for selecting and removing backgrounds with minimal variation in color.
Note: These materials are provided to give prospective students a sense of how we structure our class exercises and supplementary materials. During the course, you will get access to the accompanying class files, live instructor demonstrations, and hands-on instruction.
In this video we'll continue going through selection tools with our crane hook removed photoshop file open. Moving to our tools bar, we'll first select the lasso tool.
Essentially the way the lasso tool works is we have freehand ability to create our selection. Therefore, if we click and drag a selection, once we release our mouse, we'll see that it creates a selection from the area we've created. We have the ability to change our feathering.
And let's create a new selection and delete it. And hit CTRL D on the keyboard to deselect. We'll see that we've removed part of the blue background.
While this could be helpful in removing the background, I don't always trust my freehand ability with the cursor and mouse. Therefore, let's continue moving through selection tools. Next, we'll work with the polygonal lasso tool.
And the way that this works is by clicking, and each time we click with this tool, we'll create a new point for our polygon. When we see the circle on the bottom right of the cursor, we'll know that it will finish the polygon and we'll have our selection. Let's hit delete on the keyboard, and we can delete this part of the blue sky.
While this could be helpful for selecting certain shapes, because this crane hook has rounded corners, it may not be the most effective use to be able to remove our blue background. So let's move on to our next selection tool. We'll now work through the magnetic lasso tool.
This tool allows us to click once, and it will do the work of recognizing the contrast difference between different colors. It does the work, and in this case, between the blue and the hook. I'll close off this polygon.
And when we click with the circle on the bottom right, it shows us it will close off our selection. While this can be helpful in snapping to edges and creating a selection, again, I don't always trust my freehand. Therefore, it's helpful for specific situations, but not all situations.
Let's hit CTRL D to deselect this area. Next, let's go to our quick selection tool. I often use this tool when I'm working with a variety of shapes and objects.
Essentially, it works by allowing us to go to the options bar and change the size. Let's change it to 50. And we can now see it on our screen.
And if we click and drag, we'll see that Photoshop does the work to see what it thinks that we want in our selection. For example, if I wanted to highlight parts of this image, we will add it because the quick selection add selection is highlighted. And if we go to our options bar and select subtract from selection, we can subtract certain parts of our image simply by clicking and dragging.
Let's go back to new selection. And if we click and drag, we can see that this would be helpful for moving the blue background. However, if we zoom in, we will see that it does highlight part of this bar.
Therefore, we'll go again to subtract from selection and simply click and drag. While it's not perfect, it is certainly helpful and easy to use. Again, we'll want to remove from this part of the image.
We have a relatively good selection that we could delete. Let's zoom back out and hit control D to deselect. And we'll go over our final selection tool, the magic wand tool found in the tools gallery with the quick selection tool.
The magic wand is probably the best tool for this job because it samples the color that you click and creates a tolerance to select pixels that are of the same color. If we take the magic wand tool with a tolerance of 32 and click on the gray middle, we'll see that it selects many of the pixels of the same or similar color. If we do this on the metal above, we'll see that again, it's sampled only within a tolerance of 32.
Let's now change this to a higher tolerance of 60, meaning it will draw from pixels that are of an even higher tolerance or difference from the pixel we selected. If we click here, we'll see it's drawn from many more pixels that are within 60 tolerance of the pixel we chose. We can click on these and see the difference in tolerance.
Because of this feature, this probably makes the best use for selecting the blue background since the blue varies very little. We can set our tolerance way down to 20 and hit ENTER and then click the blue background. As we'll see, it's only drawn from the blue that's touching on the left.
We'll hold shift on our keyboard until we see the plus sign on our cursor and we'll continue to add to our selection. Finally, we'll get the middle blue between the hook and with all of the blue selected, but none of the hook, we can hit delete on our keyboard and then hit control D to deselect. As always, let's toggle the visibility of our original and we can see we've successfully removed background without removing any of the hook.
Let's save our work using control S and in the next video, we'll be working to create a panorama out of multiple images. See you there.