From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Using the Object Select tool - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Using the Object Select tool

“

- [Instructor] Photoshop's object selection tool uses AI and machine learning to help select objects in an image. While I find that sometimes I need to make small refinements to the selection, it can be much quicker than starting from scratch. Plus, Adobe frequently updates the learning model, and I expect it will continue to improve over time. So I'll select the object selection tool, and by default, the object finder is on, and these arrows will animate while it's finding objects in the image. Then when I position my cursor over an object, it will highlight that object that it has found. If you find this magenta overlay with the outline distracting, you can use the gear icon here in order to maybe change the color or decrease the outline or the opacity of the overlay. I only want to select two of these huts, so I'm going to click on the first hut, and then I can either select the second icon to add to, or we can just hold down our shift key and click on the second hut. Once I have my selection, at the bottom of the layers panel, I'll click on the adjustment layer icon and add a hue saturation adjustment layer. But I don't want to change the hue for both the paint as well as the roof. So I will double click to reset that, and then I'll pick up my targeted adjustment tool, which gives me onscreen controls. If I click in the red area and drag to the left, it's actually going to desaturate the red, and that's not what I wanted either. So I'll use command Z to undo, and this time I'll hold down the command key while I click and drag, and that will change the hue instead. So we can choose any color around the color wheel. I think I'll go ahead and pick this blue color here, but it's a little bit too saturated, so I will go ahead and desaturate it as well. Alright, then I'm going to tap B to select the brush tool. And I'm going to make sure that I'm painting with black in the mask, because black is going to hide the adjustment, and I need to hide the adjustment right down here where it's just selected a bit too much of the hut. This is wood and not painted, so I just don't want to affect that, because the paint color is throwing a little bit of color on that area. Okay, there's another distracting element that I want to remove, and that's this sign. So let's go ahead and zoom in. And if I grab my object selection tool, it's not going to select just that sign. But I can switch to either the rectangle or the lasso mode, and then I can click and drag out a selection over the area that I want it to select, and it kind of shrink wraps it down to that sign. So with the sign targeted now, and by the way, you can always turn off the object finder, with the sign targeted, I need to expand that selection. So I'll choose select, and then modify and expand. And let's expand that by about 10 pixels. And before I remove that sign, I want to make sure that I have the background layer targeted, and then I can choose edit and select either content aware fill or generative fill. It's a relatively small area, so let's try content aware fill. We can see the results right here. So let's go ahead and apply those and click Okay. Then I will deselect using command D, and we can see it's done a really great job with that roof area. So as we can see, the object selection tool can help us to quickly select objects in images so that we can make adjustments or retouch areas in our photographs.

Contents