Hi. Welcome back to the PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com
I'm Jesus Ramirez.
In this video, I'm going to show you how to make fast, smooth selections in Photoshop.
You're going to learn several tools and techniques to create smooth edges on your layer masks
to get amazing cut-outs. Then,
I'm going to show you how to apply the same technique to smooth out the edges of a black-and-white logo.
There's a lot to learn in this tutorial, so stick around to the end so that you don't miss a thing.
I'm sure that you will not regret it.
Okay, let's get started.
We're going to work with this document that contains two layers, a gray background and
the wrench that we're going to mask out.
We're going to start out by creating a selection around the wrench.
We're going to make that into a layer mask, and then I'll show you how to smooth the edges
of that layer mask.
And you can make a selection a lot of different ways.
For example, you can select the Quick Selection tool and click and drag to make a selection
around your object.
Once you make your selection, you can then click on Select and Mask, and that will bring
up the Select and Mask workspace.
Now, before we continue, I just want to point out that if you're in an older version of
Photoshop, CS6 or older,
you're not going to have the Select and Mask workspace, which looks like this.
You're instead going to have the Refine Edge dialog, and you can still follow along with
this tutorial on older versions. It's only going to look a little different.
And let me show you what I mean by that.
In an older version of Photoshop, you'll have the Refine Edge dialog.
And you can actually bring it back in newer versions by going into Select, Select and
Mask, and holding shift.
And then click, and that brings the old Refine Edge dialog box. So in older versions, this
is what you're going to see.
And under Adjust Edge, you will see the sliders that we're going to work with.
Keep that in mind. In old versions, make a selection.
Create your layer mask, and then open up the Refine Edge and follow along with these layers.
Now, I'm going to press Ctrl D, Command D to deselect,
and I'm going to start from scratch for those of you who are in newer versions of Photoshop.
And all you really need to do is select the layer, put your layer selected, simply click
on Select and Mask.
And that will open up the Select and Mask workspace. U
nder View, you can use Onion-Skinning, and then bring the transparency down.
Because at 100%, you're not going to see your wrench or the object that you're selecting.
And that's because we haven't selected anything.
We came into the Select and Mask workspace without any selection or any mask, and we're
going to select everything from within the workspace.
So if you bring down the transparency, you can see what we can select.
And we're going to use the tools in the Tools bar to make a selection.
We're going to start with the Quick Selection tool, and I'm going to click and drag on the
wrench to select it.
As you can see, it's really easy to make a selection with the quick selection tool, but
there's actually an easier way,
and in newer versions of Photoshop,
you have access to Adobe Sensei, which is Adobe's artificial intelligence.
And we're going to let it make the selection for us. All you need to do is click on the
Select Subject button.
I'll press OK to discard my current selection, and Adobe Sensei, the artificial intelligence,
will analyze the image and make a selection out of whatever it thinks is the subject of
the image.
And as you can see, it did a really good job. It's not perfect, but it really jump-started
my selection process.
So what I need to do now is simply fine-tune the selection,
and again, with the Quick Selection Tool active
and the plus option selected, I'm just going to add the areas that it missed, like the
back part of the wrench here.
And I can either click on the minus button or hold Alt, Option on a Mac, and click and
drag to deselect from the areas that you didn't want to select.
And notice that just by simply clicking once, Photoshop was smart enough to remove the white
out of this inner area. It's really, really powerful.
I'm going to increase the transparency to 100%
so that we can see other areas that we missed, like the top of the wrench here,
and I'm just going to click and drag to add those to my selection.
And just like that, I've selected the wrench.
The selection looks good, but if I switch my view into the black and white view, we'll
see the layer mask. With a layer mask,
black hides, and white reveals.
So anything in white will be showing, so you obviously see the shape of the wrench. I'll
use the Zoom tool to zoom in, and you'll see that the edges are very jagged.
They're not smooth at all. And this is going to make the cut-out look really bad.
But under the Global Refinements, we have tools where we can adjust the selection, and
I'm going to stay in the black and white view
so that you can see the adjustments that I make and how they affect the mask.
So all I really want is to remove the jaggedness from this layer mask.
And to do so, I can drag the smooth slider to the right, which uses an algorithm to remove
the peaks and valleys of the edges of the mask, and it tries to even them out.
And obviously, the further to the right that you drag, the more that you smooth the selection.
But you create other issues like really round edges.
And you don't really want that.
So you have to fine-tune it accordingly so that you get rid of the jaggedness, but not
create other problems.
Then you can continue working with your mask. Notice that we created other problems here
like this area in the tip here.
And to fix those areas, I want to do something that might seem counterintuitive, which is
increase the feather, which would blur the mask.
So I blur those details away.
Then with the contrast, I can make the light gray pixels white and the dark gray pixels
black, and it creates a smooth edge once again, like so. So notice how we fix that area.
Once I press OK, Photoshop will create a layer mask, and we can see our gray background,
and now we have a smooth edge.
The mask is not perfect, but we can always fine-tune it with a Brush tool. And we're
going to paint with black to hide and white to reveal. I'll set my foreground color to white,
and click once, and hold shift,
and click again to make a straight line in between those two points.
That must have been a little hard to see, so I'll do it here.
I'll click once, and then hold shift, and click again, and Photoshop creates a straight
line between those two points.
I'll click on this arrow to make my foreground color black.
Then, all I need to do is go around the wrench using this same technique
to smooth out any imperfection.
The next thing that you need to do is make sure that there is no fringing around your object.
I'm going to click on the Hand tool and click and drag to pan this up,
so that we can see the bottom of the wrench, and you can see that we have fringing in this area.
And the fringing is simply the edge halos that you get on selections. In this case,
we have a white edge because the original background was white
and of course, I could continue using the brush tool to paint with black and remove
the fringing, but there's actually a better tool that you can use that not a lot of people use.
This is one of those tools that nobody ever talks about.
I haven't seen many videos on it. You might have seen one of my videos on this tool, which
is, I believe one of the few if not the only on YouTube on this particular tool.
And that is the Minimum filter.
The Minimum filter, found under filter, other, minimum, is a tool designed for layer masks.
It allows you to contract layer masks based on a pixel value, so I can click and drag
this to the right, and notice that the layer mask contracts.
And it does a really, really good job of removing fringes.
And what you need to do is simply drag the slider to the right until the fringe is gone,
maybe just a little bit more, and then press OK, and now we don't have that white outline
anymore.
What I'll do is I'll double-click on the Zoom tool and you can see the final outcome. One
thing I want to mention is that if you want to learn more about how that particular filter
works, the Minimum filter, then watch my tutorial on the Minimum and Maximum filter.
They're both filters designed to work with layer masks that, again, not a lot of people
use. So I highly recommend watching it.
They're really, really powerful, and they're going to save you a whole lot of time when
you're making selections. I'll place a link to that video right below in the description.
The next thing I want to show you is how to smooth out a pixelated logo using this same technique.
I'm going to go into this document, and you're going to see a black and white logo that has
very rough edges.
So if you're a designer, you might get this from a client, or maybe you have a really
old JPG, then you scale up, and you get really jagged edges.
The point is is that you have either line art, a black and white logo, or anything that
is black or white, and you want to smooth out the edges, and what do you do to smooth
out the edges of this logo? And we can actually use the same technique.
We need to make a selection first, and we're actually going to use a channel-based selection
to create a selection out of this logo.
I'm going to click on the Channels panel,
and from here, you can see the red, green, and blue channels.
These are the channels that make up your image.
In a black and white image, all the channels are going to look the same.
And we're going to use them to create the layer mask.
And all we need to do is simply hold Ctrl, Command on the Mac, and click on any of the
channel thumbnails. The red, green, or blue. It doesn't matter.
That will load the active pixels as a selection. The active pixels are actually the white pixels.
So right now, we're not really selecting the logo. We're selecting everything but the logo,
and you can tell that we're doing that because there's a selection going around the canvas,
and that's not what we want. We want the opposite.
To select the opposite, with the selection active, you can click on any of the selection tools.
I'll select the elliptical marquee tool,
and I'll right-click and choose the option select inverse.
And that inverts the selection. So now I'm only selecting the logo.
Notice that the marching ants are no longer on the edges of the canvas.
And then, I can simply create a new solid-color fill layer, and select any color that you
want. I'm going to select lack for now,
and press OK,
and I'm just going to disable the background layer, and I'm going to create a new solid
color, and I'm just going to make it white so that you can see.
This is a layer mask. The layer mask is what's creating the shape of the logo.
And I can adjust it just like any other layer mask.
So if I click on select and mask, and what I'll do is I'm just going to change the view
to on layers so that we can the, the actual layers and not a different view, I can adjust
it just like I did before.
I'm going to zoom in by pressing the Z key and clicking.
And I'm just going to click and drag on the smooth slider, and it smooths that out.
I can maybe even feather it a little bit, and then add some contrast, and now we have
very smooth edges on that logo.
If I double-click on the Zoom tool to zoom into the 100% view,
you can see how smooth those edges are.
So I'm going to put them into a group by holding Shift, clicking on both,
then pressing Ctrl G, Command G on the Mac.
I'll zoom in to give you a better view before and after.
These are the techniques that you can use to create smooth selections in Photoshop.
One thing I want to mention is that if you're looking for razor-sharp masks,
then a pixel-based mask or a layer mask is probably not the right way to go.
So in this case, we used a pixel-based selection to create the mask, and that will not give
us the sharpest mask possible.
If you really want the super-sharp mask, then consider using a vector mask.
They take a little longer to create, but they use Bézier curves to create the masks.
So these lines, these points, these are curves that allowed me to select this wrench, and
I get much, much sharper edges, as you can see.
So I highly recommend using those, if you're looking for razor-sharp masks and selections.
I'm not going to take the time in this video to show you how to make them.
But I do have a tutorial that shows you everything that you want to know about vector masks.
I show you how to use them, how to create them, tips and tricks.
So I highly recommend watching that tutorial as well. I'll also place a link right below
in the description to that tutorial.
But, anyway, I hope that you enjoy this tutorial.
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Leave your questions down in the comments below, and I will see you at the next tutorial.