DIS2105: Making Selections

 * Remember at all times to add to a selection by using shift and minus from a selection by using option

Manual Selections – recap points
    •    Draw freehand selections with the Lasso tool
    •    Selecting straight edges with the Polygonal Lasso tool
    •    Selecting with the Pen tool and paths – makes paths which can be loaded as selections and saved as work paths
    •    Making selections from shapes
    •    Adding to and subtracting from selections
    •    Saving selections – adding and subtracting from saved selections

Automatic Selections
    •    Using the Quick Selection tool – looks for an edge, ie a change in contrast
    1.    Make a selection with the QS tool, with the settings on default – you can see that there are limitations here – as soon as there is a tonal shift, the selection will most likely expand to where it shouldn’t.
    2.    Now try using the ‘subtract from selection’ option, to ‘show’ the tool what to ignore
    3.    Continue making your selection – it should now be sticking to the edges of the shape much better.

    •    Using the Magic Wand tool – Automatically selects adjacent pixels of similar tone
    1.    Toggle the ‘contiguous’ option to see how tool can select all or only one instance of a sampled colour

    •     Selecting with Color Range
    1.    Open ‘Cactus_Flowers.psd’ and go ‘Select/Colour Range’ to launch the tool. The aim here is to select the 2 yellow flowers in the foreground only.
Instead of using the very small preview window in the dialogue box, choose ‘image’ from under the preview and change ‘Selction Preview’ to quick mask as below:

    1.    In the ‘Select’ drop down, you can select a variety of colours using the presents, you can also select shadow, highlights and mid tones too.
    2.    Go back to just ‘Sample colours’ and with the plain eye dropper selected, click in to the middle of one of the foreground flowers
    3.    Hold down shift and select a few other yellow spots within that flower, to widen the sample – this is the same as using the the ‘plus’ eye dropper tool.
    4.    If it gets hard to see your selection in the quickmask mode, choose another preview mode – for example ‘Black Matte’ to get a better idea of how you are going.
    5.    Add to the selection a bit more until you are satisfied.
    6.    Now we need to remove those flowers in the background from the selection. To do this, there is an option called ‘Localized clusters’ – check this box.
    7.    You can now access the range slider, which is by default set to 100 – pull this value down to decrease the size of the area taken in to account by the tool. The fuzziness slider work in a similar way to the ‘tolerance’ in the wand tool.
    8.    It may be preferable for you to do this part in the ‘Black Matte’ view. Once you are happy with the selection, hit ok.
    9.    The point of this selection exercise, was to change the colours of these 2 flowers in the foreground, so now that they have been selected, go into the ‘Create new fill or adjustment layer’ icon and choose ‘hue and saturation.
    10.    Pull hue down slightly to change the yellow to a pale orange.