Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [208]
Sometimes you may find it helps if you make an initial selection and then apply a succession of subtractive strokes to define the areas you don't want to be included. You won't see anything happen as you apply these blocking strokes, but when you go on to select the rest of the object with the quick selection tool, you should find that as you add to the selection, the blocking strokes you applied previously help prevent leakage outside the area you wish to select. In fact, you might find it useful to start by adding the blocking strokes first, before you add to the selection. This aspect of quick selection behavior can help you select objects more successfully than was ever possible before with the magic wand. However, as you make successive additive strokes to add to a selection and then erase these areas from the selection, you'll have to work a lot harder going back and forth between adding and subtracting with the quick selection tool. In these situations it can be a good idea to clear the quick selection memory by using the ‘double Q trick’. If you press the key twice, this takes you from the Selection mode to the Quick Mask mode and back to Selection mode again. The stroke constraints will be gone and you can then add to or subtract from the selection more easily since you have now cleared the quick selection memory.
1.
In this example, I selected the quick selection tool, checked the ‘Auto-Enhance edge’ option and dragged to make an initial selection of the plant interior. Then, with the key held down, I dragged around the outer perimeter area to define the areas that were not to be excluded from the selection. I continued clicking and dragging to select more of the plant leaves (while also dragging outside) to fine-tune the selection edge.
2.
I clicked on the Refine Edge… button and selected the ‘On Black’ mask option, which displayed the cut-out selection against a black background color. I contracted the selection slightly and applied a Smooth amount of 3 to smooth out the jagged edges. I found that by raising the Feather to 3 pixels and increasing the Contrast I was able to achieve the desired selection outline of the plant leaves.
Combining a quick selection with Refine Edge
1.
Here I wanted to demonstrate the capabilities of the new, revised Refine Edge/Refine Mask feature and show how, when used in conjunction with the quick mask tool, you can use it to mask tricky outlines such as fine hair. To demonstrate how this works, I have selected here a photograph that I took of my daughter, Angelica. This was a good example to work with since her blonde hair was strongly backlit by the sun. There was a reasonable amount of tone and color separation between her and the background scenery and it certainly helped that the background was slightly out-of-focus. Overall, the conditions were pretty favorable for making a cut-out mask. Having said that, there were a number of areas where the tones and colors between the subject and the background matched quite closely and these would present more of a challenge.
To start with, I selected the quick selection tool from the Tools panel and applied a succession of brush strokes to select Angelica's outline. As is often the case, every now and then I had to hold down the key to switch to subtract mode in order to fine-tune the quick selection. There was no need for me to be too precise here, but it is usually helpful if you try to achieve the best quick selection you can. I then double-clicked the Background layer to convert it to a normal layer and was ready for the next step.
2.
With the initial selection prepared, I clicked on the Add Layer Mask button in the Layers panel (circled) to add a layer mask based on the current selection. I then went to the Masks panel and clicked