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Photoshop

Selections

Quick Selection Tool

The Quick Selection tool has two variations:

• Quick Selection tool
• Magic Wand tool
  

Quick Selection Tool

The Quick Selection tool was added to Photoshop in CS3 and became the default (and favourite) selection tool, pushing the trusty Magic Wand tool into the background...or, more precisely, underneath it in the Toolbox. The Quick Selection tool is brush-like, letting you "paint" your selection on the image. It's not a replacement for the other selection tools; sometimes it's best used as the final step in fine-tuning a rough selection. The keyboard shortcut for the Quick Selection tool is W (formerly used for the Magic Wand tool).

The Quick Selection tool has a brush tip that you drag around inside the area you want to select. The tool will pick up similarly coloured pixels and can detect edges.

Quick Selection Tool Options

Selection Options

The three selection options are New Selection, Add to Selection, and Subtract from Selection. If no selections are present in the image, the New Selection option is automatically in effect. Once you release the mouse button, it will switch to the Add to Selection option automatically. If you find you've painted "outside the lines", you can switch to Subtract from Selection to remove the parts of the selection you don't want.

Brush Picker

This option lets you select the diameter and hardness of the brush tip. You can also change the brush size while you're selecting by pressing the left square bracket ([) to decrease the diameter or the right square bracket (]) to increase it. A smaller brush size has a lower tolerance and will be more sensitive to detecting edges.

Sample All Layers

If the area you want to select is divided between several layers, enabling this option will look at all the layers instead of just the current layer.

Auto-Enhance

This option adds some smoothing as you're using the Quick Selection tool.

Practice Exercise: Quick Selection Tool

1. Open pink_rose.jpg that's found in your NewImages folder.
   Click on the Quick Selection tool and set the Brush size to 30 pixels. Begin dragging around the interior of the rose without going past the edge. You'll see similar areas of colour become selected automatically. Keep adding to the selection until all parts of the rose are selected right up to its outer edges.
   
2. You may experience the same thing we did here. The Quick Selection tool also selected the background in the lower right corner of the image. To correct this, switch to the Subtract from Selection option and drag in the lower-right background area. This should remove the unwanted area from the selection.
   
3. This is the final result.
   

Magic Wand Tool

The Magic Wand tool makes its selections based on a colour range in an image. The extent of the range depends on the options you set.

To use the Magic Wand tool, click in the image on a colour that you want to select. Photoshop will compare the value of the pixel you clicked on with other pixels in the image and will add other pixels to the selection if they meet the criteria set in the Tool Options bar.

Magic Wand Tool Options

Selection Options

These four buttons allow you to:

• create a new selection,
• add to a selection,
• subtract from a selection, or
• intersect with another selection.
  

Tolerance

Tolerance will increase or decrease a colour range for the selection. If you wanted to select all the orange in the cat image, you could increase this number. If you wanted to select a narrower colour range, you would decrease the value.

Anti-alias

This option will apply anti-aliasing to the selection that you draw. Anti-aliasing will provide a smooth and crisp edge around the selection.

Contiguous

When turned on, this setting will limit the selection to pixels that are next to each other and within the designated tolerance.

Sample All Layers

This option will make a selection using all of the layers in the Photoshop image. This is disabled by default so only pixels on the current layer will be selected.

Practice Exercise: Magic Wand Tool

1. We'll use the rose image again. Remove the previous selection by pressing Ctrl-D (Cmd-D).
2. Set the Tolerance to 0 and enable Anti-alias and Contiguous.
3. Click once anywhere inside the rose. You'll probably select just a single pixel. At most, only a few adjacent pixels will be selected. Setting the tolerance to 0 means that only adjacent pixels containing exactly the same RGB value as the pixel clicked on will be included in the resulting selection.
4. Deselect by pressing Ctrl-D (Cmd-D).
5. Set the Tolerance to 32, a generally good setting for selection tolerance.
6. Click on the lower-left petal of the rose. Your selection look something like the example shown here. You can keep increasing the Tolerance value to include more pixels in your selection or you can use multiple selections - a topic that will be covered later in this module.
7. Deselect by pressing Ctrl-D (Cmd-D).
   
8. Disable the Contiguous option and click on the same petal as before. This time the Magic Wand selected pixels matching the Tolerance setting throughout the image.

You could use multiple selections to successfully select the entire rose. Since the Quick Selection tool worked so well, it was the better choice for this particular image.

9. Close your file without saving it.
   

Quick Selection Tool Summary

• The Quick Selection tool lets you "paint" on a selection by dragging a brush over the image.
• This tool has three Selection Options as well as the Brush Picker, Sample All Layers, and Auto-Enhance options.
• The Magic Wand tool makes selections by comparing the RGB value of the pixel clicked on with other pixels in the image and includes other pixels within the prescribed colour range in the selection.
• This tool has several options: the four Selection Options, Tolerance, Anti-alias, Contiguous, and Use All Layers.
• The Tolerance option determines how closely the RGB value of other pixels must be to the target pixel before they will be included in the selection.
• The Contiguous option, when enabled, will cause only adjacent pixels to be considered for the selection. When it is disabled, the entire image is considered.

Quick Selection Tool Keyboard Shortcuts:

• Quick Selection tool: W

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Photoshop - TOC - Introduction - Books -
Selections - Links - Questions -
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Photoshop - TOC - Introduction - Books -
Selections - Links - Questions -
1 - 2 - [ 3 ] - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 -