07-A - Beginning Photoshop & Graphic Design

QuickLINK to Lesson 00 FP 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15
Lesson 7: 07-A 07-B 07-C 07-D

Lesson 7 - Objectives 1-2 (Monday)

B07-01 Principle: The importance of selections in Photoshop

Selections are central to working in Photoshop. The most basic workflow in Photoshop is to select something and then use a tool, adjustment, or command to do something to the selection you've made. In the image at right, I've made a selection in the shape of a circle in the planet-like sphere. The selection looks like a dashed line in the image, but in Photoshop they move - so they are often called "marching ants."

Being able to make a selection in Photoshop is so important that the application gives you many tools, and many ways to make a selection. You've already learned some of them in previous lessons, but in this lesson we will go over them in much greater detail. A good portion of the advanced Photoshop class is dedicated to advanced selection techniques. We'll focus on the more basic ones in this lesson. Let's begin with a new feature - Select Subject. Watch the video below...

Video: ONE-CLICK Selections in Photoshop w/ Artificial Intelligence (6:32)

B07-02 Skill: Make a selection, save a selection, and reload a saved selection

Below is a brief listing of the ways you can make selections in Photoshop. Each link below connects to a short video showing how the tool is used. These are for ease of use as a reference. Many, but not all, of the videos are repeated below in the lesson, along with image files you can download and try for yourself. These selection skills are critical to using Photoshop's full power - so take time and learn them. Practice, too, will help you.

Pen Tool
Horizontal Type Mask Tool
Vertical Type Mask Tool
Quick Mask Mode (Use the brush tool to make a selection in this mode)
Select Color Range
Select a Focus Range
Masks, Clipping Masks
Using Channels to create a mask

Save a selection so you can reload it later

Watch the video, "Photoshop: How to save a selection, and reload it later on."

In this video you will learn how to save a selection that you can recall later on - even after you've closed the file and come back to it days later. Saving selections is an important feature that gives you a lot of power over your images. Selections are saved as "Alpha Channels" in the channels panel. I'll show you two different ways you can reload a selection when you need to recall one.