in this final course tutorial we cover affinity photo selections
selections are a way of selecting part of an image to work on rather than editing the entire image as
you will see later they're closely related to layer masks which we've looked at previously
affinity photo comes with several tools you can use to create selections which you'll find in the
tools palette let's start with a simple example using the rectangular marquee tool after selecting
the tool i can click on the image with my mouse while continuing to hold down the mouse button
i can then drag out a rectangular area then when i release the button it completes the selection
the animated dotted line around the area is called the active selection if i move my mouse over the
selection you can see the pointer changes shape now i can click with the mouse button to drag the
selection and reposition it but confusingly what i can't do is change the size of the selection
once it's made if i want to make a bigger or smaller selection i need to create a new selection
sometimes you'll find that the existing selection gets in the way if you want to do this
it's then usually best to remove the selection first in the select menu with the deselect option
you can also use the keyboard shortcut of command and d or control and d if you're using a pc i can
then draw the new selection let's now look at some of the controls in the toolbar starting with the
mode buttons you'll find these same buttons appear in the toolbar for many of the selection tools
when i've been using the rectangular marquee so far it's been with the mode set to new this
means each time i draw with the tool it creates a new selection replacing any existing selection
but if i change this to add the tool adds to the existing selection when i draw the new area
doesn't even need to touch the existing selection for this to work we then have the subtract mode
which we can use to remove areas from an existing selection and finally there's the intersect mode
this combines the new and existing selections so that only the area common to both is selected as i
mentioned many of the selection tools have these options for example when i choose the freehand
selection tool you can see the mode options in the toolbar what's often overlooked though is that you
can combine selections made with different tools watch what happens when i set the mode
to add and then use this to draw a new selection it adds the new selection to extend the one that
i made with the rectangular marquee this is useful because each tool has its strengths and weaknesses
you often need to combine tools to produce the best selections for example the rectangular
marquee tool was quick and easy however i could only use it to draw a rectangular shape selection
but with this tool i can draw irregular shapes like the sky there are also three ways to use
this tool which can be selected in the type section of the toolbar currently it's set to
draw freehand to use this i click with my mouse to set the starting point for the selection i
then continue to hold down my mouse button whilst drawing around the area to select when i release
the button affinity completes the selection drawing a straight line back to the starting point
now let's look at the difference when i select the polygonal option as with the freehand option
i can click and draw whilst holding down my mouse button and the selection follows the mouse but
with this option i can release the mouse button without causing it to complete the selection
this allows me to move my pointer to a new position on the image then when i click the
new point it draws a straight line selection to that point it's only if i click back on the
starting point that i complete the selection the other way to complete the selection though
is by double clicking with the mouse this then draws a straight line back to the starting point
the final option with this tool is magnetic which is great for drawing along edges earlier when i
tried to draw around the sky freehand it wasn't very accurate but when i'm using the magnetic
option i click once on the starting point then affinity photo detects the edge i'm drawing
along and automatically selects it i can also draw freehand with this option if i click and hold down
my mouse button to complete the selection and move back to the starting point and click that
it's also a good idea to make larger selections in sections which you can do by using the add mode
when it comes to using selections it's not enough to just have an active selection you can see this
on this levels adjustment layer if i change it because it's still affecting the entire image to
limit the adjustment to only the selected area we need to first convert the selection into a
mask this happens automatically when we add a new adjustment layer and there's an active selection
in place but we can also add a new layer mask to an existing adjustment layer to limit it after
creating the selection it's usually a good idea to save it in case you want to reuse it in the future
whilst you can turn a mask into a selection we often end up modifying masks during editing
a better approach is usually to save the selection as a spare channel in the image and then create
masks from this as you require them you can do this from the select menu using the save
selection option then if we look at the channel studio panel you can see the new spare channel
this is then saved as part of the image file so you always have it available unless it's
deleted let's clear the current selection now by pressing command and d on the keyboard then
to reload the selection we can right click on the spare channel in the channels panel
this opens a menu where we can choose load to pixel selection
we'll clear the selection again and zoom in to look at the sky more closely notice the selection
we used has created a hard edge to the adjustment between the sky and the ground this is because we
didn't feather the edge of the selection when we created it we could have done this by setting a
feather value in the toolbar but that would have affected all the edges of the selection
if we just want to feather part of the selection as we do here it's often better to edit the
layer mask that's been created we can do this by painting on the mask with a soft white paint brush
but before making this change let's select the area with the freehand selection tool this will
prevent the brush strokes from affecting the rocks on the horizon i'll then select the brush tool and
set the hardness to zero percent to create a soft edge i also want to use a low opacity of around 20
to help blend the adjustments with multiple brush strokes now let's look at a couple more extremely
useful selection tools the first is the flood select tool this has the same new add subtract
and intersect modes that we looked at earlier but they're only shown as icons when using this tool
it's a good idea to have the source set to all layers the tool works by sampling an area of the
image and then selecting similar pixels setting the drop down to all layers means we sample all
the image layers to create the selection rather than just a single layer the tolerance setting
controls how close a match a pixel needs to be to the sampled area to be selected if i
set a low value and click on the sky it only selects part of the sky but when i increase
the value pixels don't need to be such a close match the contiguous option is also very useful
when it's on a pixel must be next to another selected pixel in order to be included notice
in this example we only select the sky as a result but if i turn off the contiguous option and select
again it includes other areas of the image the other selection tool you'll probably find useful
is the selection brush this time we only have an add and subtract mode using the selection brush i
paint over the area i want to select and then the brush magically does the rest if you want to know
more about how to use the selection brush watch this video next in it i explain a secret feature
to give you greater control i hope that you've enjoyed this video and the others in the course
if you haven't seen the other lessons you'll find links to them in the youtube video description
along with my affinity photo books thanks for watching and i hope to see you again soon