Adobe Photoshop Help With 3 Selection Techniques

There is no shortage of Adobe Photoshop help on the net, but if you want to become efficient in making selections, keep reading. Selections are one of the most important tasks you’ll perform in Photoshop, and a good selection means the difference between ‘believable’ and ‘laughable’.

At any cost, in all but the simplest selections, do your best to avoid the Magic Wand. It is a very amateur tool, to say the least, and yields poor results, to say the best.

The Magic Wand does have its uses though.

If you have a black rectangle on a solid white background, as in figure 1, that’s exactly what this tool is made for – select away!

The second technique is done with the Color Range option and often, this can yield wonderful results for selectively altering colors in your composition.

For example, if you want to change the hue of a motorcycle you’ll often have the tank, some body, and perhaps some accents on the bike.

Follow these simple steps:

• Open an image that you need to change the color of a specific element


• Click the ‘Select’ menu


• Click ‘Color Range’


• Use the eyedropper to click on an area in the image that rightly defines the color and watch the selection window. (you can use the + and – eyedroppers to refine your selection)


• Click ‘OK’ and once the selection is made, immediately add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and you can change the color.

Then, of course, we have simple selection tools like the Marquee tools. Since most of these are pretty well known (rectangle, ellipse, polygonal) I’ll stick to the heretofore less known Magnetic Lasso tool.

This tool does a remarkably good job of selecting edges. Just take a look at this fast and easy selection using the Magnetic Lasso tool.

Since I love giving Adobe Photoshop help, I’ll gladly tell you about this secret weapon.

To use the tool, all you do is click on an edge, then run it along that edge and it will create points for your selection. It’s not perfect, but it’ll give you a great start.

With all your selections, the important thing is that you end up with a good selection, and a lot of times that takes multiple steps.