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Photoshop: Quick Selection Tool

Lesson 26 from: How to Capture and Edit Landscapes in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

26. Photoshop: Quick Selection Tool

Learn how and when to use the quick selection tool to make crisp edits without losing detail. Jared models small adjustments to ensure the new sky sets into the image.

Lesson Info

Photoshop: Quick Selection Tool

So I'm gonna go over to the quick selection tool, and I'm just gonna drag across the sky, and I can keep selecting like this, and the sky has been selected. Now, it's not a perfect selection, so what we need to do is go back up to the select and mask, click on it, and this will allow us to edit that selection just a little bit. What we're gonna do is we're gonna go in and add to this selection or subtract from the selection where it's appropriate. It did a pretty good job up at the top of the hill, but not on the cactus. So we just need to come in and select the very top paintbrush tool, and we're going to choose to either minus or plus. Now remember, the selection is the sky, so it's actually encroached itself on the cactus, so we're gonna use the minus option, and we're just gonna paint around the cactus. And you can see that it's doing a better job at selecting now because it's seeing, oh, that's the cactus. And then we're gonna do the same thing right here. A little bit more. That'...

s pretty good. Now we're gonna go to the fine edges tool and we're going to add to the selection, which is kinda, we're just right next to it, and we're kinda staying in the sky, because we want to make sure that it's getting those hairs of the cactus. So it's doing a better job of selecting the hairs of the cactus. We need to add to this selection. You can see that there's some little areas where a cactus or a bush is not selected, but you're gonna find out that that's not really gonna matter. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna back out of this and we're gonna hit OK, and that's our selection. We've got our sky selected. So now all we need to do is go turn this layer back on, and once we have the selection on and we're selecting the layer of the sky that we want to pull in, all we have to do is go down to the masking option right down here in the bottom right-hand corner and click on that. Boom, now we have a sky. That sky might be a little dark for our tastes for this photograph, so all we need to do is grab the opacity and bring it back a little bit, and look how much better our photograph looks when we have a sky with clouds. It's amazing what just a little bit of information in a sky will do to a photograph.

Ratings and Reviews

James Kitt
 

I wish more people would present this way! Each step from beginning to end demonstrated in short, concise and useful actions. Every tool and technique is something that I either use, (now better) or will start using because I now understand how to use it efficiently. I highly recommend this course!

Fauzan Pojam
 

Finally, a video tutorial that taught me what I've known on basic level and truly explore how to use it properly and what everything means. I've been waiting for something like this for awhile now. Greatly improves my technique now so thank you for this!

Angie Purcell
 

Great class wi with tons of helpful hints for both Lightroom and Photoshop.

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