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[This video is part of Getting Started with Adobe Photoshop Elements 9]
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[Male] Making selections is an essential skill when performing localized
edits on portions of an image.
Photoshop Elements 9 has some automatic selection tools that can really make
the process of creating a selection quite easy.
Let's explore some of those options.
I'm beginning this video from the Elements Organizer,
and I want to use 2 photos for this video.
I'm going to open the saxophone.jpg image
as well as the tropicalbird.jpg image.
And I've selected both of those by holding down the Command key on Mac
or the Control key on Windows.
You can also search for them in your search text field in the Organizer.
I'm just going to right-click on either of those selected images,
and I'm going to choose "Edit with Photoshop Elements."
Notice that both of those images are now open,
as indicated by the tabs at the top of the Photoshop Elements workspace,
as well as the files that are listed in my project bin at the bottom of the interface.
So, I'm going to begin by double-clicking on the saxophone.jpg image,
or I could have clicked the tab up here to make it active.
And the first automatic selection tool that I want to show you
is something called the Magic Wand tool.
Now, this tool is often misunderstood because depending on where you click,
you could get a varied result.
For example, if I click up here in the upper right corner,
you may say "Well, that's not very useful."
However, depending on where you click, you'll get a much better result.
The first thing you need to understand is how the Magic Wand tool works.
The Magic Wand tool is best at making selections of areas of similar color.
So, for example, in this case, I have the sky in the background that I may want to
adjust in one way or another.
Now, the Magic Wand tool works off of a tolerance value,
and so up here in my Options bar, you can see that I have a tolerance,
and I'm going to go ahead and set that tolerance pretty low to start.
I'm going to set it to about 10, so I'll type in "10" and then press "Return."
And if I click on an area of the sky, you can see that it
just selects a simple chunk of that sky.
Now, that is because the area that I actually clicked on
was a certain color, and based on that tolerance,
it expanded that selection to a value of 10.
Now, I'm going to press Command D on Mac, or Control D on Windows
to deselect that, and I'm going to come up here, and I'm going to increase the tolerance.
Let's go with about 50.
So, once again, if I click up here in the sky, now you can see it's selecting
a larger portion of this image.
Now, you may need to play around with this tolerance value
until you get a result that you're looking for, so I'm going to change this value.
Let's go with maybe 80 and see what that does.
So once again, I'm going to click here to deselect, and I'll click again,
and now you can see that it's selecting that entire portion of the sky.
And in addition, we have this Contiguous checkbox.
Now, what Contiguous does is it only selects pixels that are connected somehow,
and that is why it's selected this area to the left but not the area in here and in here.
So, if I turn off Contiguous, I'm going to click to deselect,
and then I'm going to click one more time.
We can now see how that selection has been expanded.
Now, it also reached out into these areas here, and it's probably not what we want,
so I'm going to turn Contiguous back on,
because we can get the best of both worlds here.
I'm going to press "Command D" on Mac, "Control D" on Windows to deselect,
and I'm going to click in this area once again, and that created a very nice selection.
Now, to select additional portions, I can hold down the Shift key,
and you'll notice that my Magic Wand tool gets a plus sign next to it.
And now I can click on additional areas to add them to the selection,
and you can see that very easily we have made a really nice selection,
and now we've isolated that selection to the sky area, and we can make an adjustment.
So, that's how the Magic Wand tool works, and it does require
a little bit of fine-tuning, but for the most part, it's almost automatic
once you have it set up for a specific image.
I'm going to go ahead and close the saxophone image.
Now, this particular image might not work as well
because I really don't have an area of solid color,
so if I were to click somewhere with my Magic Wand tool,
we can see that it doesn't do too bad of a job, but it does kind of creep into the bird here,
and I'm getting part of the branch but not all of it, and I'm even missing a section here.
So fortunately, we have another tool that can be very useful.
I'm going to deselect this, Command D on Mac, Control D on Windows,
and another tool that is an automatic selection tool is the Quick Selection tool.
Now, the Quick Selection tool tries to isolate contrast edges,
and it works off of a brush, so I can use my brush setting up here
to adjust the diameter of the brush.
I can make it smaller or bigger depending on the area that I'm trying to select.
I'm going to go ahead and leave that set.
I'm going to choose maybe 98, around 100 for now.
And I can also adjust the hardness of the brush as well as the spacing.
For now, I'm going to leave them at their defaults.
Go ahead and click on this brush picker once again to close that panel,
and the way that the Quick Selection tool works is you start
painting in an area that you want to select.
I'm going to click and drag to start painting inside of this bird,
and you can see that the Quick Selection tool is trying to detect
the edges of that bird, and it's doing a pretty good job.
You can see that I'm trying not to go too far in if I can prevent it,
and once again, if I end up going too far, like I do in this example--
I'm going to zoom in here so we can see this a little bit better--
what you can do is you can hold down the "Alt" key on Windows
or the "Option" key on Mac to remove an area from the selection,
and it will once again try to detect those edges,
and I can just kind of refine that selection.
To get into this area here, I will have to make my brush smaller,
so I'm using the keyboard shortcut.
I'm holding down "Control, Option" on Mac, and I'm clicking and dragging,
or on Windows, you hold down "Control, Alt" and right-click and drag.
So, I'm just going to try to refine this edge here, hold down the Alt key
and remove that area of the selection.
I'm not doing too bad there.
That should work out pretty well, and I'm going to zoom back out,
and we can see that the Quick Selection tool did a pretty good job
of selecting that area.
And one of the nice things about this, we can do some really interesting effects.
Now that we have that selection created, I can go to the Select menu
and choose "Inverse" because that will now select everything but the parrot.
And we might want to come over here to our Quick Edit,
and we can come down to the saturation section.
And I'm just going to drag that all the way down.
And as you can see, what I'm doing is I'm really desaturating the entire photo
except the parrot itself.
I'm going to do a Command D on Mac or Control D on Windows,
and so to deselect this, I'll just come up to the Select menu and choose "Deselect."
And now I can see how I've isolated this bird, and I've done it
in a pretty automated fashion using that Quick Selection tool.
Now, just a point to note is that even in the Quick Edit mode,
I still have my Quick Selection tool that is available.
So, there's a reason for that, because it's an incredibly useful tool
that you can use on a variety of images.
As you can see, in order to adjust a portion of the image,
you need a selection tool to isolate your adjustment.
Using some of the automatic selection tools in Photoshop Elements
can really make the process simple, so you can concentrate more
on the adjustment and less on the selection itself.
