week 9 & 10 brief notes

week 9 _ Making selection
- Using the geometric Marquee tools
.  Rectangular Marquee Tool is going to be selected by default ,  it's a good base tool to come back to because when you right-click with this tool, you gain access to some of the most important commands in Photoshop and the tool's cursor is unobtrusive. Plus, it's really easy to use. If you want to select a rectangular portion of your image, you just go ahead and drag with the tool like so. If you then want to deselect the image, then just go ahead and click outside the selection. If you want to draw a perfect square, then as you're dragging with the tool, go ahead and press and hold the Shift key, like so. And notice, if at any time  release the Shift key, then will return to a rectangular selection. So again, if you want a square after you begin dragging, then press and hold the Shift key and keep that key down until you release the mouse button, like so. All right, in addition to the Rectangular Marquee, we also have the Elliptical Marquee Tool, which we'll see in a moment, as well as the Single Row and Column Marquees. Then select a single row of pixels inside the image. By contrast, if  switch to the Single Column Marquee Tool and click, then  going to select a single column of pixels inside the image. Now,  even though I don't use these tools very often, almost never in fact, they can every once in a while, be useful for drawing thin lines. But much more useful are these two guys right here, the Rectangular Marquee Tool and the Elliptical Marquee Tool, which is why they have keyboard shortcuts of M.So  just go ahead and press the up arrow key a couple of times in order to nudge that selection outline upward. And again,  emphasize,  not moving the selected image upward,  just moving the selection outline. All right, now I'll go up to the Edit menu and choose the Copy command, or you can just press Control C, or Command C on the Mac, and then  switch over to my base image right here.  go ahead and zoom out as well. And  return to the Edit menu and choose the Paste command, or you can press Control V, or Command V on the Mac, to paste Mars on its own independent layer.And also, go ahead and double-click on this layer name, here inside the Layers panel, and rename this layer Mars. And that's how you use the geometric marquee tools to select either rectangular or elliptical image elements here inside Photoshop.

-Painting with quick selection tool
.Using the quick selection tool, which allows you to brush in selection outlines here inside Photoshop.  go ahead and switch over to my image in progress with Mars sitting right here in the middle of it, and turn off the Mars layer for now, just so can better see what  doing. Now,  going to convert this flat background into an independent layer by double-clicking on it to bring up the new layer dialog box.just go ahead and call this guy, "Landscape" and click okay. Now, we want to mask away the sky, and the easiest way to do that is to select this fourth tool down, which is the quick selection tool. If you're not seeing it, go ahead and click and hold on that tool and select the quick selection tool from the fly-out menu. Now, we want to make our cursor an awful lot bigger. By default, it's set to 30 pixels as you can see up here. You can click on that little down pointing arrow head and dial in a different value, such as 100 pixels, or you can also change the size of the cursor on the fly by pressing the square bracket keys that are next to the P, as in Paul, key on an American keyboard.So pressing the right bracket key makes the cursor bigger. Pressing the left bracket key makes it smaller. Now to select these outcroppings, all you need to do is brush generally inside them. You don’t need to get close to the edge, or at least not that close, and that’s because what Photoshop is doing, and  go ahead and zoom in so we can see, is finding what it considers to be edges. An edge, by the way, is an area of rapid luminance contrast in one or more channels. In other words, right here we're seeing this contrast between this bright rock and this blue sky.You basically want to paint all the way down here, if you like, in order to add more to the mountain. The real thing that we want to do though is delineate the mountain from the sky. One of things you're going to notice about this tool is sometimes when you're using it, you'll see an edge as you're painting, and then when you release, the edge will transform. It'll change ever so slightly. Sometimes it actually changes pretty erratically. So, the selection outline you're seeing as you paint isn't always entirely accurate. Now notice that  still have this area down here at the bottom of the image that  haven't selected. could continue to paint with this tool if want to or just go ahead and zoom out here a little bit.  could add in the effect of a different selection tool. So in other words, you can mix and match the effects of different selection tools as much as you want.

- Add , subtract and intersect selections
.switch back to the Rectangular Marquis tool by selecting that tool from the Marquis Tool flyout menu. And now, notice if  drag inside the selection and this is true when you're using any selection tool, what you'll do is you'll move that selection outline to a different location, which can sometimes be helpful, but in this case, it's obviously not what I want.So just go ahead and press control Z or command Z on the MAC to undo that move. If  drag outside the selection, then  begin a new selection outline and wipe out the old one. Again, that's not what  want so  press control Z or command Z on the MAC to undo that change. Now let's say you want to add to a selection outline, one option is to go up here to these icons on the left side of the options bar and notice the second icon in reads Add to Selection. If  go ahead and click on that guy and drag, then  will add to the existing selection outline, like so.Again, that's not what I want so press control Z or command Z on the MAC. You also have these options to subtract from the existing selection outline or find the intersection of one selection and another. And just so you can see what that looks like, go ahead and select the Intersection option and then marquis around this area. And notice now,  left with just the intersection of that rectangular marquis and my previous selection outline. All right, go ahead and undo that, and of course,going to be doing a lot of undoing .And apparently,  should never have selected it in the first place because this is proving to be pretty hard. So  just go ahead and reduce my cursor even more and alt paint that sky like so and  get in there as closely as possible. Basically, when you're drawing selections like this, it's better to select too little than too much because if you select to much, you'll end up with halos, in our case, blue sky halos around your selection outlines. So  go ahead and alt click that little bit of sky away and that little bit of sky as well.And now it looks like we have it so  go ahead and press control zero or command zero on the MAC so that we can see the marching ants surrounding these jagged rocks all the way down to the very bottom of the image. And that is how you add to or subtract from an existing selection outline using any selection tool available to you here inside Photoshop.


- Colorizing a layer with color overlay
-. In the end, decided that I wanted to change the color of these clouds here. So that they better match the red inside this Mars-shaped moon. And while this has nothing to do with selections, it is a really great trick for colorizing a single layer, not using a hue saturation adjustment layer, but rather more simply using a color overlay effect.  going to start by clicking on the clouds layer to select it. Then drop down to the fx icon at the bottom of the layers panel and choose color overlay. By default, that may end up filling all of your clouds with red like so. That's because, you want to change your blend mode from normal to color if you want to do a straight colorization like so. So you can see now managed to colorize my clouds red. Or, if you wan to maintain the original saturation values, and just change the hue and nothing more, then choose hue instead. In which case, we'll get a slightly more muted effect. Now I can change the color to anything  want.go ahead and click on the color swatch. For example, if  wanted to make the clouds orange could change the hue value to 30 degrees. And we'd have these muted oranges in the background. Or you can just lift a color from the image itself. Notice, as soon as  moved my cursor out of the color picker dialogue box, it changes to an eyedropper, at which point  just go ahead and click somewhere in Mars there in order to lift its hue saturation and brightness values. And now going to change the hue to 355, let's say. take the saturation value to 40%, although that doesn't really matter, because we're actually using the original saturation values in the clouds themselves, and brightness value of 100% is just fine. At which point,  go ahead and click "Ok" a couple of times in order to apply that change. And the result is the actual final version of the composition that we can see full screen when I press shift+f like so. And then  scroll up a little bit as well, so that we can see that the result is a kind of fiery bounce coming off the planet and reflecting inside the clouds.


week10 _ The quick mask mode
. Combining the best of the selection tools
.first thing to do is grab that Quick Selection Tool, if need be from this flyout menu.You may recall that it has a keyboard shortcut of "w", after its companion, the Magic Wand Tool. Now, before start every chapter, just so that you and are on the same page, go ahead and right-click on whatever tool is showing on the far-left side of the Options bar, and I choose Reset All Tools, which is why the Auto-Enhance check box is turned off. That is not what we want, we want it turned on so that we get the highest quality selection outlines possible. Next,  going to go ahead and paint above the bird, like so, and notice that Photoshop does a pretty darn good job of selecting this region, but as soon as  round the bend here,  end up selecting into the beak.And all can say about that is that is the Quick Selection Tool for you. It oftentimes cannot see extremely obvious details. Which is why we'll need to come back to the beak in just a moment. But first, just go ahead and paint under the bird. Everything works nicely down here. And then  paint around, under the tail feathers, and that works nicely as well. And of course, always bear in mind that the Quick Selection Tool is automatically set up to add to an existing selection. The problem is, as soon as  paint above the feathers,  end up selecting into that entire wing.And again, it can be quite mystifying what this tool is up to at times, but what  can assure you is that this approach is not going to work. So, just go ahead and press Ctrl-Z, or Cmd-Z on the Mac, to undo that change. And now,  just go ahead and zoom in on this wing region here, so that we can see it a little better onscreen, and  switch from the Quick Selection Tool to the Magic Wand Tool.  could also do that by pressing Shift-W. Now, by default, the Magic Wand Tool is set up to create a new selection outline. If you want to add to the existing selection, press the Shift key, so you can see a little plus sign next to the cursor, and click.Alright, now  double-click in order to complete that selection and we end up with this effect here. So, at this point,  selected just about all of the background. The bird, of course, is deselected, and then we have some garbage over here on the left-hand side, which we will fix in the very next movie, in the Quick Mask Mode. But for now, that's how you combine the best of the three automated selection tools, the Quick Selection Tool, which sees the big edges, the Magic Wand Tool, which sees differences in luminance levels, of course on a channel-by-channel basis, and then finally, the Magnetic Lasso Tool, which is great for fine edges.

- The fastest way to save a selection
.to save a selection is to go up to the "Select" menu and choose the "Save Selection" command.And when you do you're going to generate a new channel here inside the Channels panel. But, if only for the sake of variety,just go ahead and cancel out of that dialog box. The easier way to save a selection is to go to the Channels panel and then click on this icon down here at the bottom, the one that says "Save selection as channel." And when you do, Photoshop will go ahead and automatically create a new channel and it'll auto-name it as well. I'd say, though, that you want to name the channel, at which point you can go ahead and double-click on that channel's name and then give it some other name instead.But let's say you don't want to do that, you want to name the channel as you make it. Well in that case,  just go ahead and drag that channel down to the trash icon in order to get rid of it, and instead of clicking on this icon,  press and hold the "alt" key, or the "opt" key and click. And that will display the "New Channel" dialog box. And I'll just go ahead and call this guy "rough selection," like so, and then click "OK." And  now managed to save off my work. The thing is really saved it until go up to the "File" menu and choose the "Save" command, at which point Photoshop will prompt me to use a different file format because, after all, the current format, which is JPEG, does not accommodate alpha channels.The best format if you're working with a flat image, that is, no layers, with one or more alpha channels is the TIFF format right here. So the native Photoshop format is going to do just fine, but TIFF is going to afford you better compression, so you're going to get a smaller file size. And I'm just going to go ahead and call this guy "Rough selection" once again, and then  make sure that the "Alpha Channels" check box is turned on, that's very important, and that "As a Copy" is off. And now I might as well turn on the Thumbnail here and click "Save," and then inside this dialog box make sure that LZW Compression is turned on. That's the best way to reduce the size of your mask. It is entirely lossless compression, by the way, so it's not going to hurt a darned thing. Pixel Order you leave alone, Byte Order you can do whatever you want with. You don't want the Image Pyramid so you just want to go ahead and click "OK" at this point to save that selection. And so remember, whenever you're spending more than about five minutes on a selection outline, be sure to go ahead and save it here inside the Channels panel, just by clicking on this second icon in, down here at the bottom of the panel, the one that reads "Save selection as channel," or, if you want to name the channel as you make it, go ahead and "alt" or "opt" click that icon.


- Reversing a mask with invert
. convert it to an independent layer by switching back to the Layers panel and then double-clicking on the Background item and that'll bring up the New Layer dialog box.At which point  just go ahead and name this layer bird and click OK. Alright, now we need to convert the selection to a layer mask by dropping down to the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and clicking on it. At which point, of course, realize my mistake, which is I never got around to selecting the bird, I just selected its background. So  go ahead and press control + Z, or command + Z on the Mac, to undo that change. I could just go up to the Select menu and choose the Inverse command, or press control + shift + I, or command + shift + I on a Mac, but I want to show you how things work in the quick mask mode.So  go ahead and switch over to the quick mask mode by clicking on this icon down here at the bottom of the toolbox or  can press the Q key like so. At which point  see sure enough he is deselected because of the Rubylith overlay and the background is selected. Now to inverse that all we have to do is invert the image. And here's why. go ahead and switch over to the Channels panel and you can see if  turn off the RGB image the problem is that the bird is black, representing an area of deselection and the background is white, which translates to selection. Now incidentally  can turn the RGB composite on and off when  working inside the quick mask mode just by clicking in this column of eyeballs or can press the ~ key. And the ~ key is the one that's in the upper left corner between the escape and tab keys on an American keyboard. So you press the tilde key to turn RGB back on, you press the tilde key to turn it back off.  going to go ahead and turn it back on because  want you to see that the way to reverse a selection once again in the quick mask mode is to go up to the Image menu, choose Adjustments, and choose Invert, which has a keyboard shortcut of ctrl + I, or cmd + I on the Mac.And now if you go ahead and switch to that image you'll see your wonderfully selected bird against its new background. And notice that even those blurry wings look absolutely great. But if for some reason you're not altogether happy with them you can just go ahead and select that layer mask by clicking on its thumbnail here inside the Layers panel, and then you can once again go ahead and select the Smudge Tool from the Blur Tool flyout menu, you can increase the size of your cursor like crazy, and then you can just basically smear that mask back and forth as much as you like.smear the top of the wing back and forth a little bit as well and maybe even do so with the smaller cursor in order to produce that effect there. And that's how you introduce your wonderfully quick masked image into a new background, as well as how you reverse a mask using the Invert command and either show or hide the RGB composite by pressing tilde.


-Expanding and contracting a selection
. to the Select menu and not choosing Grow, even though you would think that that's the way to work, but you may recall from the previous chapter, grow is actually going to expand the selection according to the magic wand tolerance value.So Expand is going to make the selection outline larger by a specific number of pixels, Contract is going to make it smaller by a certain number of pixels. So if  were to choose the Contract command for example, and notice that one of the downsides of this command is it has no preview, but let's say  decided to contract the selection by just a single pixel, and then click OK,  that selection outlines become thinner than they were before, which of course is the opposite of what  looking for, so just go ahead and press ctrl + z or cmd + z on the Mac to undo that effect. eturn to the Select menu, choose Modify, and choose Expand, and  will once again enter a value of just one pixel. Incidentally, you don't need to worry about this checkbox because we're nowhere near the boundaries of the canvas and then click OK, and notice now the selection outlines have grown to cover up all of the black. So we won't be having that problem we did at the end of the previous movie. Alright now,  go up to the Layer menu, choose New Fill Layer, and choose Solid Color, we'll go ahead and once again call this layer lead, click OK, make sure the hue and saturation values are zero, and then take the brightness value up to 50%, and click OK.And notice we have now completely covered up the black in the background. Alright, now we need to add some shading in the form of an effect known as bevel and emboss. And you get to it by dropping down to the fx icon at the bottom of the layers panel and then choose Bevel Emboss, and the default settings are pretty much what we're looking for but let me walk you through these really quick. Style should be set to Inner Bevel so that we're seeing the shading on the inside. Technique is smooth, a depth of 100% is just fine, direction should be up, the size value may be a little different than the default.set it to five pixels, we want soften set to zero, angle and altitude should be 135 and 30, respectively, we're not worried about the gloss contour, the highlight mode should be screen, the shadow mode should be multiply, after all, screen is the bright mode and multiply is the dark mode.  have the colors set to white and black respectively and both opacity values are 75%. In which case, you will get the effect you're seeing on-screen as soon as you click OK in order to accept that effect.Alright, now  go ahead and zoom out by pressing ctrl + 0 or cmd + 0 on the Mac, and  will turn off that layer of white in order to expose that cheerful background. Alright now, believe it or not, there's just a couple of changes left here.  going to turn off the effect layer for a moment so that you can see the original bird in the background. Go ahead and click on that bird. Now, he should be translucent so that we can see the clouds, for example, in back of him, but if  were to just press the "5" key to reduce the opacity to 50%, as you can see in the upper right corner of the layers panel, we would be able to see through to him, but it's not the right effect.It just ends up making the hummingbird look kind of dingy, so  go ahead and take that value back up to 100% by pressing the "0" key. What we want to do is darken the background as if we're seeing through glass. And you can achieve that effect using the preeminent darkening mode inside Photoshop, which is multiply. And that will produce this effect right here. Alright, now we want to integrate the colors from that effect layer, so just go ahead and turn that effect layer on, then click on it to make it active. And then, select the foremost contrast mode, which is Overlay, in order to produce this very colorful effect here.And then the last thing  did was turned on this string group that contains three layers of string that  created in advance. And now as you can see,  have a different effect than  showed you at the outset, and you're going to have a different effect too because every time you apply stained glass inside Photoshop you get a random result. But with any luck, it looks every bit as good as mine. Alright, now  going to press shift + f in order to switch to the fullscreen mode and going to go ahead and zoom in a little bit as well and maybe scroll up so that we can see the top of the bird's wing.And that's how you turn a fakey stained glass effect into something more closely resembling the real thing using a combination of selection techniques that revolve around the quick mask mode.

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