Lessons

Lesson Info

Q&A 2

that ingenuity would like to know if you could please repeat the steps back to start the refined edge tool. I don't know if you wanna wait. Okay? Yeah, definitely. We'll go back. And so what we're gonna do here is the selective. Shut this off. To enter into the refine edge tool, you have to have a selection. You have to have a selection around something. Put a selection around what it is that you want to, um, refined the edge on make sure it's like the right layer here. There we go. In this case, I want to do a selection around him. I picked the background. It's a lot easier to select. And then I just go under in verse, which is shift command I and invert the selection. What's inside this election is what I can affect. What's out? That aside, this election is left alone than with that. I can either go into the select menu and choose the refine edge. It'll be great out if I have no selection, or I can simply have any one of my selection tools active and in the control bar for any one of...

the selection tools We get the button that enters into the refine edge tool. And then we jump right in right back to where we started from. Awesome. Another question. Um, someone would like to ask about a cr raw. I'm not really sure what that means. A cr raw. Yeah. Can I ask about a cr raw? It's adobe camera raw. I'm wondering if the question means that they want to know more about, um if this sort of thing will work in a raw file in a double camera off. I don't think camera raw actually has anything like this. I know it's got noise reduction, which is a new feature in CS five. Maybe maybe they could just clarify what the question. That would be great. I'll get back to you on that. OK, so there we go. Nice simple selection here with hard edges. And we got one with both soft and hard edges there. And then we've got ones with really bizarre our dio fun stuff. Next week, we're gonna show you all the masking features and how we can go in after we've done all these great selections go in here and clean it all up to make it look like we actually knew what we were doing. Isn't that great? Keep everybody coming back. The questions are they're waiting for more questions to come through. Folks, someone did ask, How did you get this original image in white background or how is that this particular one was shot on a white background. I've taken it out of its white back on. Put it back in his white background. I don't know how many times I mean, it could just as easily body done on a background like this, so Yeah. Okay. Yeah, because if people think that's easy than you know, I'll put it on a different color background. We can send it to them. Okay. We're just reading through some of the questions here. They could take this and actually put it inside the flower arrangement here. Someone says you were so clear. There are no questions needed. Jason. Wow. Okay. You know, that's kind of ridiculous. Statement. Yeah, that there we go. Not that's I feel like on the fringe of going through and doing a scrapbooking class again. I see a question we can relay. It's pretty simple one. How do you win? Invert a selection. Oh, great way to invert a selection here once you have your selection active. Um, just going your select menu and choose inverse, which is shift command, I or shift control. I on the PC just takes everything that you have selected and inverts it so that great everything else is selected. Have a question from Dorian the chat room. Is there a trick when, When working with dark hair on a dark background? Yes, next week. No, Um, what you're when you're doing anything like this with hair selection there. When you go in, do the best selection you possibly can, because that's gonna help the refine edge tool be able to differentiate what it is between the dark hair and the dark background. Um, there's a couple of the things you can do is well, Andi, Here's here's one that you could try to go ahead and trick this into thinking that it's all what it should be. And so what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna select, like, a really dark color here. I'm gonna put it behind. Not on him. I'm gonna put it here. There we go. I'm gonna put it on this and I'm actually gonna go in here. And when emerged, these two layers together. So this is coming on a dark background. Obviously, we have a little white spikes on it as well. But if you have trouble figuring out where the edges of the object is compared to the background here, do this duplicate your layer so that you have a duplicate layer completely. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna do what I tell you, not to him. We're gonna just directly on the image here and go in here and actually adjust it so that you get some contrast between what it is you're trying to select in the background. I don't care how it looks. What I'm going for is I'm going for contrast. I want to get contrast in and out of this. So since I've got kind of this dark purple background and kind of dark hair, it may be difficult for it to select. So I may go into human saturation here, and I may go in and change the color a bit to see if I can get you know, some type of shift, their your de saturated or saturated a lot and then go in. Maybe use my levels here to brighten up the bright areas, darken up the darker areas to get some contrast in between there and then do my selection from there. Okay, I'm even go in here with the, you know, with the Red Channel here and cut out some of the red here. I just, you know, bump it up so that I can get a lot of contrast between what it is I'm trying to select. Now, obviously, we're not doing color correction at this point here. What we're doing is we're trying to get the most contrast that we possibly can. Once I do that, I can take my highly contrast it portion of my image, enter into the refine edge tool and get a really good selection on that. And then once I got that selection, and if this if this election was like this, you know, I go in to refine my edge and my selection ends up like this, I can turn this layer off that I was working on. Go to this layer and then apply that selection. Okay? I do that quite a lot when I'm working In fact, this one was probably a really good example. One of the quickest ways to go in and select this Because if I had gone in here and use my magic wand tool and selected all these areas here and all the similar areas, it's gonna go ahead and pick up a lot of these highlights through here, which is not what I wanted, but it's gonna pick up these highlights all the way through. So I take my own advice. I duplicate my layer, I go in and I just put a whole bunch of contrast on it. Just darken it way up, okay? And even just knocked down that to the point where everything gets pretty dark going to levels, too, if you want to and really darken up those areas, okay. And any little highlight areas that are showing through, like, thes highlight areas that I don't want it all. I can just go in and I'm gonna paint in black on those areas, cause I just don't want those to show up at all. Okay, now, I didn't do this on my original image, obviously, but all these highlight areas here are just ways that I could use my magic wand told to select, but I don't want Teoh, so but I'm doing as I'm just creating a really quick and dirty selection here. Those areas I do a little bit better edge on this as well. Get rid of those highlights there. And then I use this for my selection so I could go into my refined edge, get that all done. And now I have just saved myself a whole lot of time, Gotten rid of all the portions that I don't want to have selected here, and then I have a much better selection to start with right off the bat. People in chat room love this tip. That was really helpful. So, in fact, I would just run through it really quick here. So I'm gonna take this, and now I'm going to go in select using my magic wand. Now I can select all the similar ones inverted, so I get just the rial going to refine edge. In fact, I'm going to turn this one off, go into my original one here, then go into the refine edge using that selection I did, and you'll notice that I don't get those little pockets in the corners as much because I put a lot of contrast there. So I took care of the contrast. I didn't let Photoshopped take care of it. And this is a lot easier way. See how much of a cleaner edge I get from this that I didn't get before? This is a lot cleaner edge, so I'm gonna use the smart radius there. I can smooth out that edge ever so slightly. Clean it up. And now I've got a selection. Mint leaves just a little bit when I start smoothing things out and it tries to fill those little areas in, but it just makes it that much easier for the keyboard shortcut junkies. Can you tell us the name of the program that shows the keystrokes and shortcuts? Oh, yes. And does it work on every other program? Or is it just voted shop? No, this is This is just a platform application. So it's called mouse Pose A. And it's like 16 95 and I absolutely love it. You can shoot mouse clicks. You can dio the mouse pose a effects here that I can focus in on certain areas. here Any keyboard shortcuts that we have. Um we can do all keyboard shortcuts or just modifier keys. Nothing else. You can also animate windows. You can highlight a window so I could go and look at something here. So it highlights the entire window instead of just focusing on a little portion of it. Really nice stuff. Thank you. Think they make it for the PC as well, But so a question from Kendra in Twitter. I don't think you ask this Kemah does the selection tool hope when your model person with hair standing in front of a busy background, you know, we have the baby background, but not the hair. Let me show you this. OK, we've got the guy in the background here. He's all clipped out. I'm just gonna merge this entire thing together. It's gonna flatten the whole image here. Okay, there it is. It's on a busy background. How do we go ahead and we do this? How do we make this work? Well, the same way you're going to do any other refine edge tool. You're gonna get the best election you can around the object and go from there. So if I select this and I get a pretty good selection of him around there. I'm going to clean this up a bit now. I'm gonna go through and kind of take off these areas that I don't want enter in the refine edge tool and see how I dio. So there it is. Let's go into the refine edge tool. And now I'm going to go in and do the Smart radius here, and I'm going to see how this how this works and it seems to do a pretty good job at picking it up. Not great. If I'm not getting the desired results out of this, then I'm gonna go back in here and just hit the save button there, didn't I? I'm gonna go back, and I'm gonna put a selection around this, and I'm just What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use this as an example here. I'm just gonna put this on into its own layer. So we get just this and this is what I want to dio. I'm gonna take this, duplicate the layer, and I'm gonna go in here and I'm going to start getting, you know, adjusting the contrast here so that I can much better define that contrast edge on. And if that's the case, you know, I'm gonna jack up this so I couldn't have that if necessary. I can even go in and paint this with white, you know, paint with white all along here to kind of clean up that edge. And because I don't need any of this, all I'm doing is using this for a selection. Really? Get rid of that and trying to get his clean of selection edges. I possibly can, because I've got some yellows in here. I can try to de saturate the yellows. I could go in Teoh by yellows here, and I could just go in and de saturate the yellows out of there. I had some greens to like a de saturate the greens as well. Anything to get the contrast to be where I wanted to be. Do I care what this looks like? No. All I care is contrast. So what? That it was the side of his head right here. Yeah, but I'm trying to get a selection out of this, so no one's going to see this. But now I stand a much better chance of going in using refined edge tool to get what it is that I want out of the busy background. Yeah, I think too many people assume that because now that we have the refined edge tool that you can only use the refine edge tool for doing everything a lot of times you need to break it apart and work with each component separately to go in and get to where you want to be. Because it's all just pixels. You just have to figure out which pixels you want, which pixels you don't. There's lots of different ways to define that. Yeah. Uh, Jason, um, can you show again how you transfer a mask from one layer to another? Oh, yeah. I love that. Always a favorite. It's a layers. Here. Let's go cycle through this. How toe go from one masks in. Here we go. So if I had a a mask on this layer right here and here's my layer mask and there's my other one and I want to keep the same mask and I want to put it on this one. I've got two masks here. There's two different ways you can do it the difficulty way where you could actually go in hold on your command. Key in command. Click on your mask, which is going to load your selection because of a command clicking a layer of channel, a massacre, a path it will always create a selection. I can click on the new layer and then say, Hey, make a layer mask out of this election. I get that layer mask that's the long way around. It sure is fun once you learn it, but you won't use that. Another way of doing it is just going in, holding down your option key and with your option key held down. Click on the mask an option. Drag that mask from the one layer to your other layer and it'll just park it right on there. And you can see when we do that, we'll bring it over here when we hold this down. Still, eat this. When you hold down the option key, it's option right there. The cursor is double when we're dragging. That's kind of hard to see, but the cursor is double. Let's zoom in really, really big here. Option Drag See of the cursor is double that shows us that we're copying. And that's true with anything in photo shop option drag is going to give you duplicate George in the chat room. Jason is in asking, Can you then combine selections if you do it in pieces? Of course. In fact, one of the things that I had done here was when I had originally done this Riel, I didn't do it any other way. I actually did it in paths here. And so I had created pads around here because this is, you know, it's a circular real with circling holes cut in it. And what better way to do it is then go into paths? So I've gone in because there's nothing better than paths here. And I just drew these paths around here, and I can copy those pads, put him in just into the holes here. Um, I want just these inter portions to be selected here, So if you're on the path or on the inter portions, go to my paths panel, Hold down my command key in command, click on my path. My path is active. Well, now, obviously, I don't want this portion here, and I did go in and I did create a selection around. The main portion of the rial is well, so I had both the holes in the rial and also the border here. Somebody command click on the holes there and I want to create another selection there that's gonna take away those portions. Well, remember when we started off here How we have our new selection are add to or subtract from under intersect with selections. Here, we can do the exact same things when we're dealing with any type of selection channel, path, mask, whatever it may be. And the keyboard shortcuts remained the same shift is always going to add to a selection options gonna take away from a selection. And in order to turn something into a selection, a channel or a mask, we hold down our commands key. Of course, if we just command click, it's gonna turn into a selection and another selection goes away. So we're gonna keep our command key held down, and we're gonna induce our shift or option key, and we'll zoom in to show you This is well, so command turns whatever we're clicking on into a selection. And so, if a command and hold down the option key. It's going to create a selection and subtract from what's already selected. We hold down our command key and hold on our shift key. It's going to add to what's already selected. So let's show you how that works. Well done. The command key and the option key. I want to make this into a selection and subtract from what's there. Command option Click and we get our selection. I love that one of my favorites at all. It's all shows you what's going on right here in the cursor. So the command you can see how that turns into a selection command with your option key held down is going to load that selection and subtracted mint. Any other selection command will select it. Shift will add to it as well. We're winding down on the questions. You've answered all the questions. Well, you know, selection seemed like such a simple thing when they are, you just want to select those pixels that you want and you don't select the pictures. You don't want that easy. Every single one of them square they're all there. They're all neatly lined up in a row. How hard could it be? And we've just shown you that it isn't at all. Let's see. I did have a question that I had asked for a clarifying point from K the chat room and the question was, Can refine edge, tool, pick up one pixel difference in pixels. So, basically, is the refrain edge tool reliable down to the one pixel contrast. Different? Oh, absolutely, yes, yes, it is. You still have to be the judge of that, though, because it's going to go ahead and determine based on several different factors. You have to be the judge whether or not that that pixel differentiation that you want is going to be acceptable because we can expand and contract, weaken, feather, smooth control the radius of all that. And that's why we have the refine edge, because you have to be the final judge of that. But yeah, I mean will detect very, very minute changes in any of the pixels. Harry H. In the in was asking, What is the difference between selecting for an adjustment and selecting for cutting? Or is there difference? Not much difference at all, other than if you take something out of the background. You want to make sure that you don't have any fringe pixels coming out when you're doing adjustment. It all depends on what type of adjustment we're doing. If we're doing a very slight color shift in a very broad area, then selecting something in a very broad area doesn't make any difference. But if I'm going to have to do like a wholesale color shift here and I want Teoh, you know, make thes flowers blue. I need to make sure that by edge is going to be absolutely perfect, and I'm just going to saturate them just a little bit. I could probably do a selection really quick. Go ahead and you do a soft edge on there and make it two or 3% more. Contrast, E. And do I have to worry about the edge? No, because you're not going to see a one or two or 3% shift in that little edge border there. Wholesale color change? Absolutely. You're changing the hue completely. So it all depends on what you're using it for, because a lot of times all do very loose, sloppy selections, because I know exactly what kind of loose, sloppy selection. I get by with all right. What you think? Well, I think it's great. I think it's great to has been awesome class. I think that's a wrap for today. Wonderful. Thank you. So next week, we're going to show you how to take all these selections that we've done and create masks out of them and refine those masks.