Chapter 21: Making Difficult Selections

Overview

Chapter 6 covered the basics of selection making. You saw that the selection tools, such as the Marquee and Lasso tools, provide several manual techniques to isolate areas of an image. Photoshop also has a few semiautomatic selection tools, such as the Magic Wand and the Magnetic Lasso, that select pixels based on their brightness or contrast values. The Quick Mask extends selection-making abilities to the painting tools for even more control, and the Pen tool makes accurate selections with Bezier curves.

Sometimes, however, areas of an image seem impossible to select because they have ambiguous surroundings or complex content. What do you do with these problem images, short of canceling all appointments, turning off the phone, and sitting in front of the computer for the next week, encircling each pixel one by one?

In this chapter, you will learn how to select those really tough areas with a few tools and techniques that, if they don t make these selections easy, at least get the job done with a minimum of effort. You will learn about:

• Making selections with color channels

• Working with Color Range

• Selecting out-of- gamut colors

• Modifying selections

• Extracting images