Photoshop Quick Selection Tutorial

Video Transcript

"Adobe Photoshop is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated, and I am in no way affiliated with Adobe. Okay, so this tutorial, we're going to be going over quickly the selection tools that Photoshop has given us. If you see up here where my cursor is, we got the different type of lasso tools. The shortcut, as you can see is the "L" key on your keyboard. If you want to toggle through those, you hit shift, and you can see the different type of lasso tools that we got. Those are the basic ones that Photoshop has given us since the beginning, and most of us already knows which one we like to use the best. There is a new type of selection tool, which Photoshop has given us since CS3, and that is going to be the magic--not the magic wand, but the quick selection tool. The quick selection tool shortcut is "W", and what you can do is basically click select almost anything. Here I have a t-shirt photograph that I have taken for a company, and all I have to do is click and drag, and it automatically selects the shirt for me. Now sometimes, as you can see here in the center, you can see the selection did not select there for some weird reason. All you've got to do is click and drag and it goes over, and also the tag, as you can see is kind of going there. So now we have a selection of the shirt all by itself. Very cool thing about the quick selection tool, is we have a button up here at the top called refine edges, as you can see. You want to click that once you have made your selection. Now, in this dialog box, we have a few options here. We've got the radius option, contrast option, smooth, feathering, and contract and expand. The most important one, I believe, is the contract and expand. This basically, if you have a not-so-good selection, like say for instance my selection did something like this, and it left a lot of white pixels around the picture that I'm trying to select, you just drop down the contract and it actually brings the white fragments in, and it gives you a clean selection. Down here is a preview of the mask, and you can actually see what it would look like, say on black or on white, or the inverse. As you can see, the selection is extremely clean. I'm going to hit okay, and it's going to bring me back my selection. Now as you can see, it's a very powerful tool, and it's one that Photoshop put in here, and it's my favorite to use now. Basically now what you want to do is just command or control "J", and as you can see, that brought me a new layer that--actually, I have my shirt all alone on a separate layer and I can drag and drop it wherever I like. If I want to add some kind of drop shadow to it I can, and you know, make it look like it's actually on a surface, you know, you can do something like that, and then basically we've got ourselves a nice beautiful picture of a shirt. And as you can see, we have an extremely powerful tool that Photoshop has given us. Hallelujah, thank you Photoshop."