Photoshop has a number of selection tools that can help us select objects in the image based on the contents of the image including the colors, the tones and the edges. Object selection is an important aspect of image editing. This post discuss about various ways to select object in Adobe Photoshop.
Selecting Subject
To select a subject from the image
- I will open the image in Adobe Photoshop.
- Then go to Select menu and choose Subject.
- Photoshop will show the found subject if any.
Object Selection
To select a object from the image
- I will open the image in Adobe Photoshop.
- I will tap w key to select Object Selection Tool.
- Now change the mode to Rectangle as shown in the below image.
- Instead of drawing rectangle, i can click on a object to select it. If the tool doesn’t automatically find the area that you’re trying to select, we can go in and manually select one of these two modes, either the Rectangle or the Lasso mode and then try to draw a selection around the area that we want to select.
- We will draw rectangle on the image with the above tool selected.
- If I wanted to add to the selection, I could hold down the Shift key and continue clicking. To remove from the selection hold down Alt key and continue clicking.
- All the object found inside the rectangle will be highlighted by Photoshop.
Quick Selection Tool
Sometimes Quick Selection Tool might perform better than Object Selection Tool. Quick Select has edge detection built into it so not only is it selecting based on color but it will also look at the edges.
- I will tap w key to select Quick Selection Tool.
- Position the tool over the object and then click. And even if I release the cursor, you’ll notice there’s a Plus icon because Photoshop has automatically swapped me to the Add to Option for this tool.
- Hold down the Option key on Mac and Alt key on windows, subtract from the selection. We can always use these tools in combination with say the Lasso or the Marquee. Just tap the L key to select the Lasso Tool.
Magic Wand Tool is really useful when you’re trying to select large areas of uniform color like maybe a large swath of blue sky.
Color Selection
- Target the intended layer, otherwise the color range will might manipulate other layers(adjustment layer).
- Go to Select menu and choose Color Range. We can choose to select sampled colors or specific color ranges, the highlights, mid-tones, or shadows in the image or skin tones or the colors that are out of gamut. I’m going to leave it set to sampled colors.
- Next we can click to sample the different colors in the image. If I want to select more than one color, I can hold down the shift key.
- Once I’ve got the selection that I want, we’ll click okay.
- Then tap the B key to select the paintbrush, and just paint in those areas that are selected.
