From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Transforming selections and removing halos - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Transforming selections and removing halos

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- [Presenter] Often when making selections of hard-edged objects, we need to make slight adjustments to those edges to remove halos, to make seamless composites. So in this image, I want to replace the background with this base layer, and then I want to replace the reflection in the mirror using this top layer. While we might think of using the object selection tool, in order to quickly select this mirror, it'll actually make a selection that isn't very smooth around the edges. So, I'm going to deselect that and instead, I'm going to select the elliptical marquee tool. Then I'm going to drag out my elliptical marquee tool, and I'm trying to select around the outside of the mirror. I'm going to hold down the space bar while my mouse is still down to reposition the point of origin, and then drag that out a little bit further after releasing the space bar, then I'll release the mouse. But we can see that it's not a perfect selection. So in order to transform it, I'll choose select, and then transform selection. I'll use command plus in order to zoom in once and then use the space bar to get the hand tool to reposition it. Now, in order to distort this selection, I'm going to hold down the command key as I drag these corner points, and that lets me move one corner point without moving another one. So I'm just going to scoot this out, distort this a bit, and then we can bring this over at the bottom. So it's kind of a back and forth just to stretch and transform this selection so that it fits around the outside of this mirror. And this whole time, I've got the command key held down so that I can move each one of these outer anchor points in order to distort it. Alright, so let's just make that a little larger there. But otherwise, those marching ants look like they're doing a good job going around the outer side of the mirror. Alright, I'll click done in order to apply that, but I also need to add the bottom part of the mirror here. So, I'll switch to the polygonal lasso tool. I'll hold down the shift key in order to get the add to, and then I'll just click once and then again, down here at the bottom, coming back up on the right-hand side. And then when I return to the point of origin, I get the icon with the circle so I can close that selection. All right, let's add a layer mask using the contextual task bar. And then I want to zoom into 100% in order to see the edges. So they're looking pretty good here. I see a slight halo around the edge here and down here as well that I might want to minimize. So I'm going to use the select menu and choose select and mask, and we'll use the global refinements. Now I can use the shift edge to shift the edge in or out, but you'll notice that it doesn't move very far and that's because we started with a hard edge selection. If we view this on black and white, we can see there's very little transition between the black and the white. There's no shades of gray in here, but if I start adding a feather, now we get different shades of gray so that when I move the shift edge, we'll be able to move the edge of the mask farther in either direction. So let me take the feather down a bit and let's view this on layers so we can see it with the background layer. And now we can see that I can shift that edge and remove that halo. If the edge gets a little soft, we can either adjust the feather or we can adjust the contrast. Alright, let's apply that and then zoom out. And this time, I want to select the inside of the mirror. So again, I'll return to the elliptical marquee tool, click and drag out my ellipse. Use the space bar to reposition the point of origin. And then if needed, we can use the select menu and then transform selection. I'll go ahead and reposition that bottom point. And then we can use the command key on Mac or the control key on Windows in order to adjust our selection. So I'm going to pull this anchor point up a little bit, and then we can pull this one down and out. Drag this up and then just drag this down and to the right a bit. Alright, once we have the selection the way that we want it, I'll go ahead and choose done. Target the looking back layer, make it visible, and then add a layer mask. We can see, I was a little bit off at the bottom here, so I'm going to separate the mask from the layer by clicking on the link icon between them and with a mask targeted. I'll tap V to select the move tool and then just reposition the mask down. That still looks good at the top, so I'm just going to decrease the opacity of the layer by using the opacity slider and bring that down to about 75%. I'll use command zero in order to zoom out. So the next time you need to transform a selection, use the select menu and to remove a halo, use the global adjustments in select and mask.

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