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Hey everybody! I'm Nathaniel Dodson from tutvid.com.
Welcome into this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, or rather new Photoshop
feature reveal. We're going to be talking about something today called
select subject - see, I even had to check on my screen, cause Adobe
just dropped it recently! And without further adieu, let's just get into
this thing, and check it out.
Alright, we find ourselves once again, my friends, in Photoshop.
And as of January 22, 2018, which is yesterday - at the time of this recording -
Adobe has released a couple new feature updates to Photoshop.
Some UI and workspace stuff for high resolution monitors. A little
improvement in select a mask and the decontaminate color, and a couple
other, little tweaks. But they did drop a pretty cool, new feature called
select subject. Which harnesses the might of Adobe sensei, which is
an artificial intelligence engine that Adobe has been developing.
Basically, it looks at your image, and it automatically creates a selection
around the subject in your image. Or, at least, that is the claim.
Now, I have to admit that for me, complaining about this kind of technology
that has so much going on behind the scenes, and is so complex -
Well, it almost feels like I've been handed a Ferrari that could drive
in outer space, and I want to complain about the number of cup holders
that it has. It's like, Dude! You're driving a Ferrari in outer space,
one step at a time here, okay? Now, I have a series of seven images here that
we can burn through quickly, and check to see how well this feature
works, or if it works at all. So, here is image number one, now, you might
be saying, "Hey, you're cheating. This is an image that would be so easy
to select. Use something more difficult."
To which I would respond, "Have patience, my good friend." We're building
block by block to see how this feature responds to many different images.
Rome wasn't built in a day. And we don't need select subject to carve out
the Pantheon for us either. So, let's stop and smell the roses while we
examine this fun, new feature.
To execute this command, choose the quick selection tool, and simply hit
the new select subject button, and Photoshop will think for a moment,
and do it's best to determine what the subject of the photo is, and then
throw a selection around it. Now, the selection isn't perfect, but by just
jumping here into select a mask and showing it a little love, we can really
get a nice selection. Eh, here's image number two, slightly more complex
background, and a full body shot of this dude.
So let's hit that select subject button again, and check out how nice this looks.
Now, even without gussying this up with select a mask, I can invert
the selection here. CMD/CTRL+SHIFT+I and brighten up the background
pretty well. Now, if you show it a little love in select a mask, just imagine
how much better it could be!
But I digress, let's move on to image number three, and here I'll select the
select subject button again. And you can see that with this shot, it has a little
more difficulty getting a perfect selection. I think this is where it's important
to reiterate that, at this point, this feature seems to be more of a time saving
thing, rather than a click-once-to-get-a-perfect-selection type of deal.
I'd imagine though, that Adobe is probably working hard at that solution, and
maybe someday we'll be able to click and get incredible selections with a
single click. But, at this point, this is what we've got.
It saves me some time making the initial selection with quick selection,
but I could use the quick selection tool, finish adding to this selection, drop it
over into select a mask, do whatever I want, and then with this selection,
I could inverse it, and add some kind of adjustment layer - maybe here
pump a little blue into the background or something. Alright, so let's
challenge this again, with an even more difficult image number four!
Let's hit the select subject button again, and we can see here that the tool,
as well, has a hard time seeing the edges of this dark jacket over an,
admittedly, dark background. Again, I have to just remind myself, calm down,
I'm driving the theoretical Ferrari in outer space. These results aren't great,
but there is still time saved by getting my selection this far along. And again,
I can use the quick selection tool, and bring it down the home stretch.
Time to move to image number five, and whoa! Two subjects here! Well,
let's hit select subject here and see if it can identify both guys, and create the
proper selection. And boom! Look at that! As with the others, a little quick
selection tool, and maybe some mustard from the select a mask functionality,
and we'd have a pretty effective selection here. I could inverse this selection,
add a curves adjustment layer to darken the sky a little, and then pump a little red,
magenta, and yellow into it behind them, as well.
Alright, let's head over to image number six, where finally, we aren't working with a
person. Let's hit select subject and see how well it can detect the food here,
which is the subject of this photo. Now, this wouldn't be an ideal candidate for
pretty well an selection method, just because of how the image falls out of focus,
even by the time we get back to this glass of beer.
So I'd be using the selection here for something like a vignette, or some kind of
subtle background tonal adjustment, or something like that.
But, I'll still use the quick selection tool to clean up the selection very quickly,
and then I can inverse the selection, apply a huge feather to it, or something
like that, and then just add something like a levels adjustment layer and bump,
and shuck and jive with the tone here a little bit.
Alright, last but not least, let's tackle image number seven, where we're going to
cut this woman out with a crazy head of hair, and swap the background to
something else. So here, hit the select subject button, and in this case, it
actually does a pretty nice job on this selection. Let's bring it up into a select a mask,
we'll use the refine edge brush tool really quickly here to clean up the edges,
and get a good selection. I'm going to output a layer mask, and then I can simply
drag another image in as the background. Drag it under the model, and we've
done a full background swap so quickly. This feature makes doing full background
swaps, sky replacements, things like that - it's going to make that stuff so stinking
fast, and the better Adobe makes it, the more that it becomes a one click,
once and done type of feature, the faster and faster and faster things like this
are going to become.
So, in my very limited experience with this feature, it's pretty cool. And it works
pretty well, I think. I'll have to see how it works for everyone, as more and more
people start using this feature, and even as I use it more and more.
But really, how fun is it to be a pessimist all the time about these new features?
For myself, I'm going to try to have some fun and see how this feature flows
in my own workflow moving forward - and if I don't like it, well, nobody's forcing
me to click the button anyway.
And that is pretty much it for this one. If you enjoyed it, if you think you got anything
out of it, well, make sure you subscribe to my channel, so you never miss any
Photoshop or graphic design related video tutorials in the future.
Guys, for the new select subject feature, and the way it works, or maybe sometimes
doesn't quite work as well as we would like. That's it!
Get it? Got it? Good!
Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one.
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