Photoshop Tutorials - Discover the Magic Wand for Image Adjusting

Discover the Magic Wand for Image Adjusting

In this set of tutorials we’re going to do some more image adjusting.

Grab your tragic wand tool. Get an image with a similarly colored background. These are the easiest to select and the magic wand can maybe live up to it’s name before it becomes tragic again.

Adjust your tolerance setting to capture slight tonal variations in the image area you’re going to select.

Right click on the wand tool and you have a few options. After you have made your initial selection by clicking on a point within the image you can choose Grow or Similar. ‘Similar’ will take and expand the selection across the entire image looking for similar tonal range.

  

Don’t let the marching ants confuse you. All you’re doing is wanting to end up with a ‘selection’ of the blue background wall.

Now try right click and ‘Grow’. This will expand the selection area that is closer to the latest wave/click of the wand. Note that you should be on “Add to selection” in the options bar (otherwise you’ll just get one new chance to make a correct selection each time).

On ‘add to selection’ you can just keep clicking on certain areas that may be a little darker like these cracks in the wall to ‘add’ them to the selection job you’re doing.

      

You can use the zoom tool to get in there for a closer look and get more accurate selections.

The Hand tool works great when you are zoomed in. You can also hold down the space bar to temporarily get the hand tool when using a tool. Switch back to your wand (W) as your selection will still be there (unless you stray from the Basic training and lose your selection already before we move on).

Click in smaller areas like this to fully get accurate coverage when zoomed in.

Here’s an example of using different tools in getting selections; something that is covered here.

Grab the lasso tool

and choose ‘Subtract from selection’.

If there are areas that were accidentally ‘added’ to the selection you can ‘subtract’ them. For example here we don’t want any part of her selected as part of the blue wall so take your lasso and draw around these areas to ‘subtract’ them from the desired blue wall selection.

It took me a longgg time to finally understand which way to select with add or subtract to. So if you think you’ve got it now; great! (You’re sure to still benefit from the complete Photoshop video training I offer).

Here we’ve selected the background in a little bit more advanced of a selection starting to use a few different options in getting our selection (leaving the girl and dead palm tree branches behind).  Now that you have made a 'selection' you can bring up your Image: Adjustments menu to make changes just on the selected portion of the layer.

When you have made your selection and you have the proper layer selected in the layers palette (here, the layer with the wall if there are other layers)

then go to Edit: Copy.

This will retain that data of the selected area. Now go to File: New,

Press OK when the dialog box comes up to create a new document.

This feature (of copy and paste) has probably been around since the beginning of digital image editing and Photoshop 1.0 I’m sure. It’s good to learn the shortcuts Ctrl C, Ctrl N and Ctrl V.

It’s important to note that when you copy a selected area the new document will be created based on the dimension or proportion of the selected area on an X and Y basis.  Because the selected area reached the vertical and horizontal limits of the original image, the new document will be created with the same dimensions as the original document. If you want to create a new document you can either Image: Duplicate or select a layer that covers the entire image dimensions such as the background layer by Select: all and making sure the background layer is selected in the layers palette and then you can create an exact dimension copy.

Now Edit: Paste  

and you can see that we did select the ‘background’. When you paste it will automatically put that selection onto its own layer.

Well what if we made this selection of the background but wanted to select the woman as the subject? (Usually the idea but this is training to get you fully versed...)  Easy, just right click (when on a marquee or lasso tool) in the original document and then you can choose Select Inverse.

 

This will now select the areas that haven’t been selected which in this case happens to be the subject and the dead palm trees.

When making selections you’ll most often want to select the easiest way and use the tools together to get a selection. It all depends on the circumstances. With difficult backgrounds sometimes there is no easy way. The advanced art of the selection will be covered in depth in the upcoming AdvancedPhotoshop.com in the next few months.  There is plenty of selection training in the Basic Photoshop training program.

Go to the moVe tool in the upper right corner of the toolbar and drag this selection (the main subject layer) into the new document. Here in the layers palette you can see that I have both of the separate selections on their own layers.

After you’ve made a selection and put it on it’s own layer and you plan on making more changes to it; you might want to first make a duplicate copy by dragging it to the new layer icon and work on this version of the layer.

With the eraser tool you can go in and clean up areas of the selection that maybe got skipped over before.

  

Remember that you can change the size of the eraser brush in the options bar or by using the [bracket] keys.

On the duplicated layer go ahead and erase the dead palm trees (or whatever is on your sample image). Photos.com doesn’t want me actually distributing these images but you can get these same ones with full access from their website. It’s well worth it if you’re at all serious about Photoshop and especially graphic design.

You can use some more of the basic selection techniques such as right clicking and choosing Similar or grow after using the magic wand tool to select areas of blue that might be remaining.

   

In using these, once again if you have accidentally selected areas that you don’t want selected, you can use ‘subtract from selection’ in the options bar of the lasso (or marquee tools).

Then simply lasso around the area you want de-selected.

See how easy it is for you to learn? Do you have any idea how long it took me to fully understand this simple concept?  Please use the leverage of other people’s knowledge to get you where you want to be. You can leverage my guruistic knowledge of Photoshop with the Basic Photoshop.

You can use the eraser to get rid of these spots but if they’re too small you might want to select them first ie. with the magic wand tool and then you can Ctrl X them out of the picture to clean it all up.

Now find another picture which you think would make a great background. Now that you have the foreground subject and you’ve essentially removed the background, you can pull in another open image with the moVe tool by dragging it in.

It will automatically appear above whatever layer is selected in the layers palette. In this case it shows up on top (because the previous top layer was highlighted)

so you will have to move its order in the layers palette to beneath the main subject layer to ‘fit’ in the manually created ‘background’ space.

In this case the sunset was appear behind the main subject so if this happens to you remember that you have your transform options under the Edit menu. Go ahead and flip it horizontally.

Now the sunset appears on the other side where there is breathing room for it to be. This is good common design sense which you probably have, it’s just good to know the tools to how to do it!

Here we will continue covering some basic-intermediate selection techniques. Grab the polygonal lasso tool.

Since we already have a selection we’re going to get rid of a certain part of the selection and keep the part that we want to keep. 

Choose Subtract from Selection from the options bar.

Now go ahead and create a lasso selection all the way around the area that you want to get rid of from the overall selection. It doesn’t even have to be pretty AT ALL, as long as you keep the marching ants inside the area.

Just work your way all the way around the area you want to deselect. With the polygonal it will draw straight lines and you click to add a point to move it in another direction. What’s weird and cool is that you can click ‘outside of’ the actual document with the polygonal lasso to help work your way around to the start point to close it off. Try this out for yourself.

Now that you have ‘subtracted’ or ‘deselected’ that area...

...find any other areas that you want deselected, go over there and use the same method to enclose off that area to deselect it from the overall selection.     

In this case I am getting rid of the dead palm tree leaves and wanting to retain just the main subject herself.  It’s important to understand these concepts of knowing how to modify a selection.

Now with the moVe tool, remember that you can move the selection from within the selected area. In this case we already have a duplicate layer on top so we’re just moving that selected version of her over.

Here you can see in the layers palette I’ve turned off the layer and you can see the selection that we’ve made.

Go back in History to move her back. You can also use Edit: Undo Move.

Now let’s do something else. Once you have a selection you can save it a few ways. One of the ways is by right clicking (when on the appropriate tool such as lasso) and choosing Make Work Path...

This will convert the selection you have into a ‘Path’. Under the Paths palette you can see the work path that you’ve now created.

A path is one way of ‘storing’ your selection (in this case) and takes up a nanobit of space in the total file size because it is basically a mathematical equation. It saves much more space than duplicating and retaining a copy of the layer (fyi).

You can see the hard edged line of the 'Path' around your subject when you have 'Work Path' highlighted in the Paths palette.

Aren’t you glad you don’t have to learn all this stuff the hard way? Don’t be stubborn like I did. Just keep on learning everything you can with tools like the Basic Photoshop DVD training of mine. It’s loaded with tons of Photoshop training for your educational needs.

Once you have work path you can make it back into a selection by highlighting it and then right clicking and choosing Make Selection...

Press enter again if you don’t want to feather (add a light fuzzy blur around the edges) and get your exact selection back (recommended for now).  You can edit it as a selection or with the path editing tools.

In the Paths palette you can click off of the path and onto the empty space as shown to de-select the work pathand click on it to re-select or show the work path.

Paths are also covered in depth in my full video training. You’ll also want to understand them b/c you can make your own work paths (ending up in a selection or a custom shape) from scratch and they are used all the time in vector shapes and design.

Posted in: Photoshop Tutorials