Adobe Photoshop CC Bootcamp

Lesson 47 of 118

Selecting Subjects and Masking

Blake Rudis

Adobe Photoshop CC Bootcamp

Blake Rudis

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Lesson Info

47. Selecting Subjects and Masking

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Bonus: The Color Range Mask in ACR

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Lesson Info

Selecting Subjects and Masking

With select and mask, you have a couple of different options here. You can use a brush to select more or less of the area that's in there. What we want to do with this select and mask is essentially refine the edge of what it is that we're doing. This used to be called refine edge, they turned that off, it's not refine edge anymore, it's called select and mask. If we look at edge detection here, there's something called the radius slider. This alone can be good enough sometimes to make the exact selection that we need. If I move this radius up, you can see how it's pretty smart, it's starting to feather in the sides of the selection there. See that, it's actually, if we zoom in here with that radius moved way up, it's starting to actually select some of the hair. If we pull this up a little bit more, look at how that radius changes. It's pulling it some more, and that's a really good selection for the hair right there. Let's go ahead and zoom out here and see what it's doing to the res...

t of the image. Sometimes what it's doing is it's altering, essentially, the contrast of the mask that we've selected, right? It's allowing that mask, as we talked about before, there's black and there's white but there's also any transition in between. If you see any gray areas around my ear and around the top of my shoulder there, any of those gray areas will be a translucent mask, so if I have the solid color blue behind it, you might see a little bit of blue appearing in my ear, which isn't exactly what we want. We can refine that a little bit more. We can come in here, we can smooth out the edges there, see if that helps. That doesn't necessarily help. Or, we can even use our brush here. If I use my brush and I click on here, right around this area, small brush, this is essentially gonna get me back to what we would refer to as something like the quick selection tool. It's making a quick selection and it's allowing me to modify this mask. I don't want to use a big brush, if I use a big brush it's gonna start selecting a lot of the stuff on the outside but if I use a small brush, notice how it's adaptively doing that, that when I click it, I can see it spinning and thinking. What it's doing is it's making the selection for those areas but it's also calculating the radius at the exact same time. It's a very smart way to make a mask. I'll zoom out here or make a selection, rather I should say. Let's go ahead and put this on, let's look at my ear there, I'm not quite sure what's going on with my ear there. I'll change this too, overlay, that actually looks pretty darn good. It's gonna cut off a little bit of my ear here so I might have to brush in some of this area up here to get some of my ear back, brush in around here to get my ear back. This tool is kind of tricky to use, the select and mask tool. Sometimes you'll be clicking around here and if you click a little bit outside of the area, like the area of that ear, it's gonna start selecting some of the area that's on the outside of that. That's okay, if you do that, just press Command or Control + Z. Command or Control + Z, no matter where you are in Photoshop is going to let you go back one step. If you want to go back two steps, you have to press Control + Alt + Z and that will continue going back in history, two steps, three steps, four steps, five steps. The more you press Control + Alt and then Z, Z, Z, Z, Z, it'll keep going back up in your history palette. If you just press Control + Z and keep pressing Control + Z, it's going to flip back and forth between the two things you just did. Control + Alt + Z will continue going back in history, even if you're right here in something like this. We can zoom out at this point. We had a pretty good selection for this area. If I wanted to select more area though, so say like this area back here. If I press alt or option and I click there, it's gonna make the minus sign. I can start removing other areas within the image that I don't want to be there. I definitely don't want that blue area back there, and if I press OK at this point because I'm really satisfied with that selection, I now have a selection specifically just for me right there. If we want to talk about non-destructive editing, I like to make selections from there and tell it to output a selection for me rather than output that selection as a mask because I want to keep this background layer just in case. If I press Command or Control + J and duplicate that, I now have this area without a mask, okay? If I were to go ahead and go back a little bit here and I were to duplicate this layer, let's go ahead and try to think about how I want to do this so I don't end up destroying anything and still maintaining a mask. What I can do is I can make a mask on this area, which is going to ensure that I have the mask for the selection that I just made and I'm not destroying anything. Non-destructively, I still have my background if I want to paint anything in there ever again. Because I have the background already pulled, I have that selection now, what I can do is I can add a new layer here, drop this down, maybe Shift + F5, fill that with a color. Maybe I want that color to be the blue of Kansas City, rocking my Kansas City pride. It doesn't look that great at this point. I would have to do a little bit more work but that's basically allowing me to separate one element from the background using a selection, using select and mask and also using the focus area. Look at the edge of this mask here. One of the things that I want to talk about is looking at the edge, the edge of this mask doesn't look that great. We have a very fuzzy edge. What we could do with this is I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate this by pressing Command or Control + J, again because I want non-destructive editing. If I right click on this mask, I can say apply layer mask and when I apply that layer mask, what that's allowing me to do is it's allowing me to have the image that I have of myself selected and apply that mask to it so everything else around it becomes transparent instead of being a mask. Why that's important is because we have this thing up here that's hidden in Photoshop that's an absolute gem when you're doing composite work. We go to layer and we come down here to something called matting and go to defringe. That's a little fringe area. I can select this to something like two pixels and press OK and you'll notice it starts to taper in that edge just a little bit, just a very little bit to pull it in. If I need to do it again, I can just go up to layer, go to matting, maybe do another two pixels. It blends it in just a little bit better, a little bit more to get rid of some of that fringe. Because this is still a layer, I still have the capability of going into a mask and brushing away some of those areas, so the areas around the ear that got selected there, I could brush those areas away by coming in with this mask, zooming in here, and just using my brush, very light brush, to brush those areas away.

Class Description

Adobe® Photoshop CC® is a valuable tool for photographers, but it can also be intimidating. In this all-inclusive 20 lesson course, you’ll go from opening the program for the first time to creating images that really stand out. Join Blake Rudis, Photoshop expert and founder of f64 Academy, as he shows you how to maximize your use of Photoshop.

Topics covered will include:

Class Introduction & Bridge, Adobe Camera Raw, Setup Interface, Cropping and Layers
Layer Tools, Masks, Selections, Clean-Up Tools and Shapes & Text
Smart Objects, Transforming, Actions, Filters, and Editing Video
Custom Creative Effects, Natural Retouching, Portrait Workflow, Landscape Workflow, and Composite Workflow

Don’t let the many aspects of Photoshop prevent you from maximizing your use of this amazing app. Blake will help you develop the confidence to use your imagination and create the images that you will be proud to share with your clients.

SOFTWARE USED:

Adobe Photoshop CC 2018

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Photoshop Bootcamp Plug-In

Textures

Clouds

Painted Backgrounds

1 – Intro to Photoshop Bootcamp

6 – Intro to Raw Editing.zip

11 – Interface and Setup

16 – Intro to Cropping and Composition.zip

22 – Intro to Layers.zip

26 – Intro to Layer Tools.zip

43 – Intro to Selections.zip

50 – Intro to Cleanup Tools.zip

58 – Intro to Shapes and Text.zip

63 – Intro to Smart Objects.zip

69 – Intro to Image Transforming.zip

74 – Intro to Actions.zip

81 – Filters.zip

88 – Intro to Editing Video.zip

96 – Custom Effects.zip

102 – Natural Retouching.zip

107 – Intro to Portrait Workflow.pdf

110 – Intro to Landscape Workflow.zip

112 – Intro to Compositing.zip

115 – Rothko and Interfaces (Bonus Video).zip

33 – Intro to Masks and Brushes.zip

106 - Frequency Separation.zip

Ratings and Reviews

Student Work

Amazing course, but don't be fooled into thinking this is a beginner's course for photographers. The problem isn't Blake's explanations; they're top. The problem is the vast scope of this course and the order in which the topics are presented. Take layers for example. When I was first learning Photoshop (back when we learned from books), I found I learned little or nothing from, for example, books that covered layers before they covered how to improve/process photographs. These books taught me how to organize, move, and link layers before they showed me what a layer was actually for. Those books tended to teach me everything there is to know about layers (types of layers, how to organize them, how to move them, how to move them two at a time, how to move them two at a time even if there are other layers between the two you're interested in, useful troubleshooting tips, etc. ) all before I even know (from a photographer's point of view) what it is the things actually do. The examples of organizing, linking, and moving mean everything for graphic designers from Day One, but for photographers not so much. Blake does the same thing as those books. Topics he covers extremely early demand a lot of theoretical imagination for a photographer who doesn't already know quite a bit about what he is talking about. Learning about abstract things first and concrete things later only makes PS that much harder to understand. If you AREN'T a beginner, however, this course is amazing. I thought it would be like an Army Bootcamp, taking you from zero and building you into a fit, competent Photoshop grunt. Now I think it's more like Army Bootcamp for high school varsity jocks. It isn't going to take you from the beginning, but the amount you'll get out of it is nonetheless more than your brain can imagine. I've been using PS for years to improve my photographs, and even to create the odd artistic composite or two. The amount I've learned in the first week is amazing, and every day I learn something -- more like many things -- which I immediately implement to improve my productivity and/or widen the horizons of what I can achieve. If you ARE a photographer who's a Photoshop beginner, I'd take very seriously the advice Blake gives in the introduction: Watch one lesson, and practice the skills and principles you learn in that one lesson for two weeks. THEN watch the next lesson. You can't do that of course without buying the course, so it's up to you to decide whether you'd like to learn Photoshop and master Photoshop all from the same course. Learning it first and mastering it later will cost more money, but I think you'll understand everything better and have a much more enjoyable ride in the process. As for me? I'm going to have to find the money to buy this course. There is simply way too much content in each lesson for me to try to take on all at once, but on the other hand I don't want to miss anything at all that he has to share.

Robert Andrews

Blake Rudis is the absolute best in teaching photoshop. His knowledge and how he presents the instruction is clear and concise - there is NO ONE BETTER. Yes, his classes require some basic skills, and maybe I'd organize the order of (or group) the classes in a different order, but, let me be clear - if anyone is to be successful or famous in the Photoshop world, it should be Blake Rudis. I strongly recommend his teaching. I started photography and post processing in 2018, and because of this class, I'm know what Im doing. The energy you get when you create something beautiful is profound, it makes you bounce out of bed (at 4AM) like a 5 year old, to go create. It's a great ride! Thanks Blake, & Thanks Creative live.

Esther Gambrell

WOW!!! I've been purchasing CL classes for several years now and have watched HOURS of "How-To Photoshop" classes, but this is the first one I've actually purchased because of the AWESOME BONUS content!!! SERIOUSLY??!!?!? A PLUG-IN??? But not only that, Blake is SO easy to understand, and he breaks down concepts in different ways to connect with different people's learning styles. I REALLY appreciated this approach because I am a LEFT-BRAINED creative that has an engineering background, so I really connected to what Blake was saying. THANK YOU FOR THAT! There are TONS of Photoshop courses out there, but I found this one to be the most helpful in they way Blake teaches concepts so that you know WHY you're doing what your doing. I feel like he taught me how to fish with Photoshop to feed me for a lifetime instead of just giving me a fish to feed me for one day. This is the BEST overall PS course out there!!! Thank you!!!!

2,000+ classes ranging from fundamentals to advanced techniques.

Adobe Photoshop CC Bootcamp

Selecting Subjects and Masking

Lesson Info

Lessons

Bootcamp Introduction

The Bridge Interface

Setting up Bridge

Overview of Bridge

Practical Application of Bridge

Introduction to Raw Editing

Setting up ACR Preferences & Interface

Global Tools Part 1

Global Tools Part 2

Local Tools

Introduction to the Photoshop Interface

Toolbars, Menus and Windows

Setup and Interface

Adobe Libraries

Saving Files

Introduction to Cropping

Cropping for Composition in ACR

Cropping for Composition in Photoshop

Cropping for the Subject in Post

Cropping for Print

Perspective Cropping in Photoshop

Introduction to Layers

Vector & Raster Layers Basics

Adjustment Layers in Photoshop

Organizing and Managing Layers

Introduction to Layer Tools and Blend Modes

Screen and Multiply and Overlay

Soft Light Blend Mode

Color and Luminosity Blend Modes

Color Burn and Color Dodge Blend Modes

Introduction to Layer Styles

Practical Application: Layer Tools

Introduction to Masks and Brushes

Brush Basics

Custom Brushes

Brush Mask: Vignettes

Brush Mask: Curves Dodge & Burn

Brush Mask: Hue & Saturation

Mask Groups

Clipping Masks

Masking in Adobe Camera Raw

Practical Applications: Masks

Introduction to Selections

Basic Selection Tools

The Pen Tool

Masks from Selections

Selecting Subjects and Masking

Color Range Mask

Luminosity Masks Basics

Introduction to Cleanup Tools

Adobe Camera Raw

Healing and Spot Healing Brush

The Clone Stamp Tool

The Patch Tool

Content Aware Move Tool

Content Aware Fill

Custom Cleanup Selections

Introduction to Shapes and Text

Text Basics

Shape Basics

Adding Text to Pictures

Custom Water Marks

Introduction to Smart Objects

Smart Object Basics

Smart Objects and Filters

Smart Objects and Image Transformation

Smart Objects and Album Layouts

Smart Objects and Composites

Introduction to Image Transforming

ACR and Lens Correction

Photoshop and Lens Correction

The Warp Tool

Perspective Transformations

Introduction to Actions in Photoshop

Introduction to the Actions Panel Interface