Hi! Do you want to know how to use the Quick Selection Tool in Photoshop CC?
I'm about to show you how. Don't go away..
Hi there, Barry Callister for Barry Callister photography giving you hints,
tips, and tricks for better nature photography. On this channel I do gear
reviews, camera tutorials, Lightroom and Photoshop tutorials, and a whole lot more
so if you're new, consider subscribing. Be sure to check out my Lightroom CC
Tutorials as well. I'll link to those during the video in the cards up on the
right hand side of the screen and at the end of the video. Let's get started on
how to use the Quick Selection Tool for Photoshop CC. Alright so here we are in
our photoshop window I already have my Quick Selection Tool open, it can be
found over here on the left hand panel there, it's that brush with the circle of
dots around it there. If you have your Magic Wand Tool selected, obviously the
Magic Wand Tool icon will be up there because they both live in the same space
here. So Quick Selection Tool is what we want. To get those to come out, you have
to click and hold with your left mouse button. Now you can see the keyboard
shortcut both of those is W, so that's a quick way to get to the tool as well is
to press W. We'll have a look at our options up here that you have with
this tool. The first option over here, we click this little arrow that will pop
down a little window where your Presets will live if you've made any special
brushes that you use all the time and you've saved them as a preset, that's
where they will be. Here in this window and you can select them from there.
These buttons here decide what your brush or your tool will do. So this is to make a new
selection this is to add to the selection, and this is to take away from
your selection. It defaults to the add to selection when you turn it on the first
time, it will be...it will have add to selection up there, which is a good thing
to have you can leave it there, that is just fine. This here is your brush
settings, if you click the little drop down arrow there you've got your brush
size you can control from there, big or small. You can also do that with your
right and left bracket keys, which is a look a lot easier than
opening this every time you want to change the size of your brush.
The hardness controls the edges of your brush as you can see here, this is a more
soft edged brush, and this is a more hard edged brush. I leave it to a hard edge to
select, it's normally a good thing to do. Spacing - you want at a very low number.
If you turn this up to a high number, you'll find you won't get as-good-a result so
leave that down at 1%, that'll be the best thing to do. Down here is where you
control the angle and the shape of your brush. So you can, you know, make it oval
shaped if you want to get up into tiny little areas like the corners of leaves
and stuff of flowers or whatever you like. But I'm just going to leave it
circular today. So that's what happens there. The next two...these two boxes here,
Sample All Layers and Auto-Enhance are automatically selected because I've used
them before. I leave these turned on. What Sample All Layers does is...it does what
it says it samples all the layers when making a selection. The only time you
would not want that turned on is if you had another layer, let's...
I'll just duplicate this layer here. Let's say I only wanted to make a
selection from this top layer, I would turn that off and then that will just
select from one layer. But for today we're leaving that on. And then
Auto-Enhance just enhances the edges of your selection. Generally it will provide
you with a better selection so I'll leave that on as well. Selected and Mask,
I'm not going to go into today because that's a whole 'nother video (laughs). That's a
lot of information in there and I don't a touch on that today. So let's get
started, what we're going to do...I'm going to select the head of this flower here,
and this part of the stem. I'm going to leave this bit back here alone. Now with
your brush size you kind of want to make it small enough so it'll fit inside the
area you're trying to select easily. You don't want it to go outside of the area
because then you end up selecting stuff out here that you don't want.
So I'm going to start down the bottom here, just left click on my mouse and
drag up the stem of the flower there. Oops, I've gone outside but it doesn't
matter, we'll get rid of these bits later. Then I'm going to go up into the petals
of the flower they're, just going around the edges...close to the edges as I can
without going outside. If I go outside, you'll see it starts to select things
that I don't want. I can always Control + Z to undo and start again. So I'm just
going to roughly select the head of this flower here and then I'll go back in and
picks it up later. So I've done, as you can see, an absolutely terrible job of
that (laughs), but let's go back and I'll show you how to fix it up. So currently our brush
is selected...our our tool is selected to Add to Selection, so what you can do to
take away is either click that button up there or, on your keyboard, hold Alt on a
PC or Option on a Mac, and that will.. you can see it changes to minus, and you can
just take away the things that you don't want. So I'm just going to drag that up the
side of there, get rid of that there...get rid of that there...So that's looking okay
for starters. I'm gonna press Z to zoom in and just zoom in on the head of the
flower here, W to go back to my Quick Selection Tool and just fix up things up
here...make my brush a bit smaller with my left bracket key...and that's looking
pretty good for this. I'm not gonna be super worried about this...holding Alt to minus,
take that little bit away in there. And, just make my brush a little bit smaller
with my left bracket key...just clicking...Now when you're doing this, when you're
going back and refining your selection like this, it's always a good idea to do
tiny..just click here and there, instead of clicking and dragging. Because if you
make a mistake, and you have to undo it, then you have to undo a whole massive
selection. If you've just clicked little bits here and there, then you can undo
just those little bits and not muck up a whole great deal of your selection.
So that's always a good idea. So that looks pretty good up there. There's this
little bit down here on the stem, I'm gonna hold Alt and brush that out of
there because I don't want that. And then I could probably just fix up this little
bit down here perhaps. We'll just...whoops, so I did a mistake there so I'll just
press Ctrl + Z, undo that. Might add a bit more there,
just bring that up there. I'll just Alt click here and get rid of that bit of the lighter
grey. And I'm gonna say that's okay for now. So I'm going to press Ctrl + 0 to go
back out...to make my picture fit the screen, and then I'm just going to
right-click inside the selection. And what we're going to do with this is
make a layer via copy, so this will just copy this flower and put it on its own
layer and if I turn off the background layer here, you can see we have
successfully cut the flower out of this photograph. So if I zoom in, it's not...it's
not pretty but it's a start. If I was...if I had more time, I would go
in and get rid of all this background in here that hasn't...that's been selected
and stuff, and I would clean up the stem as well. But you know, for a...for a five
minute job, it's not too bad at all. So there you have it, that's how you use the
Quick Selection Tool in Photoshop CC. Now of course, there's many other ways of
selecting parts of your photograph in Photoshop, and I'll be doing videos on
those real soon, so make sure you subscribe to stay updated on that. If you
liked the video, leave me a comment down below. If you've got any hints or tips
yourself about selecting in Photoshop, chuck those in the comments too - I'd love
to hear about them. And make sure you share this video with your friends.
Be sure to check out the Lightroom CC tutorials - I've linked them up over on
the right hand side here. I'm Barry Callister for Barry Callister Photography.
Get out there and take some wicked shots, and I'll see you soon...