>>>ALAN: This tutorial is Part 2 of our lasso tool tutorials. And for this tutorial,
let's pretend that we've been hired by a fishing game company, and they want us to
isolate this boat from the image to put on their website - maybe for sale -because,
you know, it's a very attractive boat. We then have to make really clean
isolations around the edges of the boat and the oars, and then remove it from its
watery background. We would not use our marquee tools for this - it's a complex
shape, so it rules that out. We wouldn't dare use our regular lasso tool because
that's just a nightmare, and the polygonal lasso tool, as we learned in
the previous exercise, only works with straight lines. But this boat introduces
curves to us - ruling out the polygonal lasso tool. Let's then come to our final
lasso tool - our magnetic lasso tool. Now the magnetic lasso tool is quite handy.
But it's only as good as our option bar will allow it to be. It uses lines of
high contrast and it kind of makes it a sticky edge. And the lasso, then, follows
that edge without us having to be very precise. For example, if I click (I don't
have to click and hold this tool), if I just click once and begin to very
quickly move my mouse, you can see how it's kind of fighting my inaccuracies,
and it's snapping to the edges of the boat. And back to my starting point.
Now that is by no means perfect, but it's done a pretty good job on a lot of these lines.
At least enough to start. But I'm gonna go ahead and deselect this. 'Select,' 'deselect.'
I want to take us to our option bar, where we notice a contrast slider.
It defaults to 10%. This contrast slider is telling the tool how contrasting the
edges are for that selection. So if we increase this, we're telling the tool to
look for the areas of high contrast - which means it will then select areas
that have a better contrast at edge, and fumble a bit more on the areas that
don't - like the oar. Now if I lower the contrast, I'm telling it to be
particularly watchful for the areas that don't have good contrast or low contrast.
And it's a bit tackier, you'll find, as you start to trace around this.
Notice how it worked with the oar a lot better than before. I've found the default at
10% to be a good starting point, but it's worth noting that as you guys start to
work with this tool, increasing and decreasing that contrast slider can help
you make better isolations. I'm gonna go ahead and deselect, reset my contrast
slider to 10, and draw again.
Now at first glance, this has done a pretty good job, but there are some areas
that need some help. Some areas the tool kind of missed or areas that were
impossible to get - like underneath the oar and in between the boat. This is where
the post-it note icons are gonna help us refine our selections. Meaning, all we
have to do is get kind of a rough start, and then we can come back and, using the
post-it note icons, we can add selections where we missed. Or we can subtract from
the selection where we got too much. For example, over here at the back end of the
boat, I've missed this top part of this back ledge. Now because this is a
straight line, I don't necessarily need to use my magnetic lasso tool. And that
takes me to my next point - when we go to clean up a selection, we can actually use
any of the selection tools that we've covered so far. The marquee tool or any
of the lassos. So I'm going to go back to my polygonal lasso tool. I want to add to
this selection. I'm gonna click, draw a straight line across, and now it doesn't
matter what I do, because when I click at the very starting point, it pops out and
adds to that selection. Same thing over here - underneath the eye hook. I want to
subtract from this selection. I'm going to come up to my subtract post-it note
icon and, using my polygonal lasso tool, I'm going to subtract from that area.
Take some time and try to refine the edges of your boat using these different
tools and the add and subtract post-it note icons in the option bar.
[MUSIC]
So once you guys have refined your selection and you've kind of gotten used
to the add and subtract post-it note icons in the option bar, let's inverse our
selection - "select," "inverse." And then hit "delete" on the keyboard. Woah, a weird
thing popped up. "Content-aware." Let's just go ahead and hit "OK" and see what happens.
Whoa, how strange. Now for many of you, yours may look a
little different - may have filled in with water, it may have filled in with the
boat like it did for me.. We just used photoshop's content-aware fill.
You may not know this, but every Adobe program is built on a central
artificial intelligence engine called Adobe Sensei. And they are slowly
starting to integrate AI features into Photoshop and into all their programs to
make our jobs a little easier. We'll talk about an AI tool in the next tutorial.
Now the content aware fill is great for removing, like, birds in a sky or maybe a
light pole from a photograph, but when you have a selection this big, it kind of
has like a weird, artificial intelligence nightmare - and that is not
what we want to do. I'm gonna hit CTRL-Z. Well why did it do this? Why didn't it
remove our boat from the background? Because look at your layer in your layer panel.
Notice the lock icon on the far right? This indicates that the layer is locked.
Why - because you opened an original image.
Photoshop assumed this was your Picasso. You don't want to accidentally ruin an
original image, so Photoshop kind of has a safety mechanism that locks an
original image by default. Now it's really quite easy to bypass - you just
simply click the lock icon. That unlocks the layer - turning it from a background
layer to Layer 0. Now allowing us to hit delete on the keyboard and remove our background.
When you click that lock icon, it unlocks our layer and it allows it to be manipulated.
Now let's go ahead and deselect. "Select," "deselect." And now we have
- depending on your isolations - a pretty good cutout of this boat.
A good way to check is to add a brand new layer - "layer," "new," "layer" -
Hit "OK." Drag this new layer one underneath our boat, and then with our
paint bucket, fill it with black. Black background layers show every mistake.
You can see how my oar is a little bit more wavy than I'd like it to be.
You can see how the bottom kind of misses some of these weird edges.
I missed a little edge right here.
Black backgrounds are very unforgiving. So they make great ways to
cross check your isolations to see just how well you did.
So that concludes our lasso tools: our regular freehand lasso tool, our straight edged polygonal lasso tool,
and our magnetic lasso tool - all of which have a place at the table.
It's up to us to intelligently decide when to deploy them.
Now the biggest takeaway from these tutorials is that option bar. Those post-it note icons
that we've been talking about for both the marquee tool and the lasso tool -
they're gonna be there for almost every single selection tool that we encounter.
So it's important for us to practice using those post-it note icons - getting
familiar with what they do, and making use of them when we start to make
complex selections. So redo this tutorial if you need to, otherwise I'll see you in
the next tutorial where we start talking about the quick selection tool and the magic wand tool.