Understanding Adobe Photoshop: Digital Imaging Concepts and Techniques

5. Selection Tools and Techniques

If you want to really get things done in Photoshop, you have to be good at making selections. Perhaps you want to remove an object from a picture or maybe change the sky to the right shade of blue? Maybe the sweater in your advertisement needs to be blue instead of red or you'd like to duplicate some of the background crowd so your photo doesn't look so empty. In each of these cases, you're going to need an accurate selection.

While your eye can easily distinguish two bears in this photo, Photoshop just recognizes pixels. It will take some human intervention to make an accurate selection of the bears.

©ISTOCKPHOTO

Why? While you may be able to look at a digital image and clearly recognize that it's a picture of two brown bears lying on a rock ledge, your computer just sees a bunch of pixels. A little human intervention is necessary to distinguish which part of the image you want to manipulate or process. While this means extra effort, it also means that much of digital imaging requires human intervention (which means jobs for designers and artists). Accurate selections are important, and there are several techniques you can employ to get them just right. Some are easier than others, and some are more accurate. Knowing several techniques will let you make an accurate selection no matter what your source image looks like.