Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [18]
To create a Color Range selection, go to the Select menu, choose Color Range… and click anywhere in the image window (or Color Range preview area) to define an initial selection. To add colors to the selection, select the Add to Sample eyedropper and keep clicking to expand the selection area. To subtract from a selection, click on the Subtract from Sample eyedropper and click in the image to select the colors you want to remove from the selection. You can then adjust the Fuzziness slider to adjust the tolerance of the selection, which increases or decreases the number of pixels that are selected based on how similar the pixels are in color to the already sampled pixels.
Out-of-gamut selections
Among other things, you can use the Color Range command to make a selection based on out-of-gamut colors. This means you can use Color Range to make a selection of all the ‘illegal’ RGB colors that fall outside the CMYK gamut and apply corrections to these pixels only. To be honest, while Color Range allows you to do this, I don't recommend using Photoshop's out-of-gamut indicators to modify colors in this way. Instead, I suggest you read the section on soft proofing in Chapter 13.
If the Localized Color Clusters box is checked, Color Range can process and merge data from multiple clusters of color samples. As you switch between ‘sampling colors to add to a selection’ and ‘selecting colors to remove’, Photoshop calculates these clusters of color samples within a three-dimensional color space. As you add and subtract colors Photoshop produces a much more accurate color range selection mask based on the color sample data. When Localized Color Clusters is checked, the Range slider lets you determine which pixels are to be included based on how far or near a color is from the sample points that are included in the selection.
The selection preview options for the document window can be set to None (the default), Grayscale, a Matte color such as the White Matte example shown in Figure 1.45, or as a Quick Mask. Overall I find that Grayscale is a really useful preview mode if you want to get a nice large view in the document window of what the Color Range selection will look like - this is especially useful if you find the small Color Range dialog preview too small to judge from. This is just a brief introduction to the Color Range and you'll find a further example coming up later in Chapter 9.
Figure 1.45 This shows a before image (left), Color Range White Matte preview (middle) and a color adjusted image (right), made using a Color Range selection.
Modifier keys
Macintosh and Windows keyboards have slightly different key arrangements (hence the reason for me including double sets of instructions throughout the book), where the key on the Macintosh is equivalent to the key on a Windows keyboard and the Macintosh key is equivalent to the key in Windows. Although on most Macintosh keyboards you'll find the Option key is labeled ‘Alt’ anyway (see Figure 1.47).
Figure 1.47 This shows the modifier keys (shaded in brown), showing both the Macintosh and Windows equivalent key names. The other keys commonly used in Photoshop are the Tab and Tilde keys, shown here shaded in blue.
Windows users (and Mac users using a ‘Mighty Mouse’, or equivalent mouse) can use the right mouse button to access the contextual menus (Mac users can also use the key to access these menus) and, finally, the key which is the same on both Mac and PC computers.
These keys are commonly referred to as ‘modifier’ keys, because they can modify tool behaviors. In Figure 1.46 you can see how if you hold down the when drawing an elliptical marquee selection this constrains the selection to a circle. If you hold down when drawing a marquee selection it centers the selection around the point where you first clicked on the image. If you hold