Selection Strategies and Essentials
What is a selection?
Photoshop will always apply edits globally unless you protect the areas that you don't want changed and isolate those that you do. Saving the selection to an alpha channel creates a grayscale image called a mask. The mask is the outside of the selection and protects the rest of the image from any editing. Most composited images are based on masks and masks are based on selections.
Photoshop sees selections as grayscale images where white is the active area and black inactive. Grays make gradual transitions in tone between the active and inactive areas which results in a softer edge which we would call feathering. I think that some of the earlier feathering problems, for example, needing to see the feather happen by using the Gaussian blur on a Quick Mask, are now solved with the Refine Edge in the Selection Menu in CS3. You can see your selection with a Quick Mask, on black or white and with an Alpha Mask.
Types of Selections
Knowing which selection tool to use for a given image is the goal here. Also, knowing how to combine any number of them to ge the best selection possible is an even more important goal! I think this chapter really sorts that out well. Selections are based on these 5 types (and many times a combination of these are in the one image):
Here are some examples with clickable links to the original photos used for the selections. Just run the cursor over the selection images and click when you see the clickable area.
Here are some more slection images using most of the selection techniques seen in the image map above and then combined in Photoshop. The Panseys as described above, piled on one another with some Drop Shadow and Inner Shadow.
A collage of New York Broadway shows as advertised on skyscrapers. The original image is here and can be seen beneath the selections added with different layer blending modes.
Last, the little Amish wall hanging, removed from its wall with the Polygonal Lasso which has to be my most favorite of the selection tools! I am still trying to recover my skills since the fracture, shatter, dislocation and surgeries of my right shoulder last year. It is almost there and it is really good to be doing these things...with my right hand!
Images and work are © R.Joanne Johnson unless tagged as images being used from Photoshop Masking & Compositing website.
