From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Making soft-edged selections - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Making soft-edged selections

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- [Instructor] Photoshop's select subject and select and mask features are essential when selecting soft edge objects like fur and hair. Select subject uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to try to identify the primary subject in the image, and then select and mask can help to refine the selection to separate the hard to select areas. Now, select subject can be done on your device or in the cloud, and we're going to take a look at the difference. In this image, I want to select the sheep and then decrease the amount of yellow in the fur. So I'll choose the select menu and then subject, and by default, Photoshop is going to run the AI on the device, and it gave us very quick results. I'm going to save this by choosing select, save selection. I'll name it local, and then we'll save this, and it will save it into our channels panel. Then I'll deselect it, and on the Mac, I'll choose the Photoshop menu, and depending on what operating system you're on, you'll choose either preferences or you'll choose settings and then image processing. On Windows, you'll select the edit menu and then preferences and image processing, and I'll switch the select subject processing from device to cloud. So this is going to give us more detailed results, but it might take a little bit longer. I'll choose select and then select subject again. This time, it does take a bit longer, but it's given us a selection, which I will then save, and I'm going to call this cloud. Now, in order to view these selections, first I'll deselect and then I'll click on the local channel that I saved, and we can zoom in, and you can see there's a little bit of detail around the fur, but if I compare that by clicking on the cloud version, we can see that it's been able to define and select a lot more detail. Alright, I'm going to click back on the RGB, and then I'm going to hold down the command key on Mac, control key on Windows, and click on the thumbnail to the left of cloud in order to load that selection. Then under the select menu, I'll choose select and mask, and I'll change the view to its default for a moment, which is the onion skin. On the left hand side, we have a number of tools, and across the top, we have a number of options. In fact, we have the select subject option here, so you didn't need to come into the select and mask workspace with a mask. You can actually create your selection here, and in fact, you can even determine if you want to use the device or the cloud. And it's not just select subject. If we look at our tools, we have the quick selection tool, which makes selections based on the color and tonal values that you click on the image, and it also has edge detection, which would help with the edge selection. There's the refine edge tool that tells Photoshop to recalculate edges wherever you paint. So if it doesn't pick up an area, you can paint over that area in order to refine the selection in that area. There's the brush tool, which adds to the selection, or if you hold down the option key, it would remove from the selection, and that's nice if it completely misses an area that you need to pick up. And then you have the object selection tool, which selects objects in your image. Across the top, there's a refine hair option, but before I select that, I'm going to swap this back to viewing the selection against black and white, because I want to make sure that we see the difference when I click on refine hair. Alright, so you could see it actually made an even better mask. Now there are two refine modes. There's Color Aware and Object Aware, so Object Aware is usually better when there is a hard edge object, but Color Aware works better when the subject is against a different color background than the object. There's also options for edge detection. We could increase the radius here. That's just going to increase the width around the edges that select and mask is going to look for transitions between the subject and the background, and then we have the smart radius, which automatically adapts the edges based on the image content. But for now, I don't think it's really improving this mask. In fact, I think it might be hurting it down in this area, so I will leave them both off. There's also some global refinements, which we'll cover more in depth in a later video, but they're great for adjusting the edge around a hard-edged object. Alright, I do see just a few areas here within the ear as well as the horn that I do want to use the brush. So I will select that, and I'm just going to paint in order to completely include those areas right there. Alright, I want to output this to a selection, but you can also output it to a layer mask, new layer, or any of these additional options. Now I have my selection in my image area. I'm going to use the adjustment layer icon in order to add a huge saturation adjustment layer. We haven't really talked about adjustment layers, but they're layers that are non-destructive. They have masks, and we can see it's automatically converted the selection into a mask, and they're re-editable at any time. So here I'm just going to decrease the saturation, and I'm going to take it all the way down for a moment just so we can check the edges of this mask. We can see it's done a really good job. I'm going to hold down the space bar, which will give me my hand tool, and the only place I might want to go in and touch up is down here around the feet. So I'll tap the B key to select the brush, and let's just zoom in a little bit more and then get a smaller brush using the left bracket key. And then I'll want to make sure that the mask is targeted, and we can see if I option-click, wherever the mask is white, we are seeing the adjustment. So if I want to add the adjustment in this area, I need to just make sure that I am painting with white, so I'll try not to paint over any of those little blades of grass, but I can come in here and quickly just get rid of some of that yellow. Now I can also paint with a decreased amount of opacity, if I want to. I mean, right now I'm up at 200%, so that is pretty zoomed in for this. Just come over here real quick and just get a few more. Maybe right back here, I'll just lower my opacity to maybe 60%, a little bit larger of a brush, and just paint right in there. Maybe down there a little bit. I think I might have missed some over here, but okay, I think you understand the idea. I am just painting with white in order to reveal the contents of that adjustment layer so that we can see it remove that saturation. Okay, I'll use command zero to zoom out, and I really don't want to take out all of that saturation, so I will click on the thumbnail for the hue saturation adjustment layer, and just drag up the saturation slider a bit. In fact, I don't want to take any of the color out of the sheep's eyes. So again, I'll just zoom in, tap B to select the brush tool, get a little bit larger of a brush, make sure that I'm painting on the mask icon with black this time, and then paint at 100% in the eye area to bring back all of the original color that was being desaturated by the hue and saturation adjustment layer. So there you go. Be sure to use select subject to select the primary subject in your image, and then use the select and mask workspace in order to refine your edges.

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