Selecting the Background in Photoshop

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Gary for Expert Village. Now I want to select the outer area of my image, and I want to apply a color effect to it, so I'm going to use a tool, my toolbar, a selection tool called the lasso tool. And I'm going to just go around this gray area in the background, and I'm going to select it, and then apply a color to it, and that will only apply the color to that selected area. So I'm going to go ahead and start selecting it. Again, my lasso tool is the one on the toolbar that looks like, kind of a triangle with a knotted rope attached to it. Make sure that you're using your magnetic lasso tool, because that's going to help me make a selection around the sharp edges. And to do that, I go around and start clicking around the edges of the image, of the body of the image. And I go around, and I see that the lasso tool goes and pretty much makes a very close selection. Now if you see that it takes in an area that it was not supposed to--not supposed to select, then what you can do is just go ahead and click the delete key and it goes back. Each time you click it, it goes back one other point on the selection line. And you can go ahead also and click the mouse and it will make--you'll tell the tool where to make the points for the selection. So if you see that it's having trouble finding the edges, you can go ahead and go back a few points by hitting the delete key. And then also, clicking on the mouse will give you more control of where those points should be. So I'm going to continue going around the hard edges of the image, and it's doing a pretty good job of finding the hard edges of the photo. And once I go all the way around, pretty much I can start heading back now on this way. Just keep going across, and I work my way down to my starting point. And now we see that there is a dotted selection around my image, and that's going to be the area where I can go ahead and apply the color."