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Creating Great Selections with Photoshop CS-4

The Video runs for 30 minutes

Making Great Selections is a skill we must develop if we want to get the best out of Photoshop. The trouble is, there are at least a dozen different ways to create a selection. This indicates how important selections are for Photoshop to give us so many ways to make them. On the other hand, the number of choices we have make the learning more difficult. The selection we make will depend on what we want that selection to do for us. In this tutorial we demonstrate how to make a really effective selection in seconds that will enable us to make great adjustments to our images.

We also then take a more complex shape and apply a different technique and a different selection tool. So, in this 30 minute video we demonstrate the freehand lasso tool, Quickmask and also the polygonal lasso tool. In some projects we have a choice of which tool to use, but in others, the complex nature of the selection we need to make narrows down our selection tool choices to those that can deliver the quality cutout we need.

So, in the image below we can make a selection in seconds to protect areas that we don't want to edit. This is a common occurrence in our photography where exposure may need adjustment in three quarters of the image, but not in the bottom quarter and we must be able to make the selections quickly and effectively.

In other cases what we are looking for is a very accurate selection, but one that can be made fairly easily. The automatic tools in Photoshop are great in some cases, but in the majority of our photography selections need to be made manually to get the quality required. With the old metal advert below we can make the selection so accurate that it follows the wrinkly corroded edge of the metal. This sort of accuracy really does make the difference between a manipulation that is OK, to one that is perfect. We want our selections perfect or not at all. Here we demonstrate our Techniques.

If you look at this enlargement of the bottom left corner of the metal advert you can see the care taken in the selection, we show you how.

Download our readme file HERE