So far, every tool we've
used has been applied to the whole picture but one of the best things
about Photoshop is our ability to select just a part of the picture
to apply an effect to.
We've already used the
ubiquitous marquee tool to select a rectangle for cropping but it can
be used for this too.
Look carefully and you'll see that the beach and the sea are brighter in the second version. The rectangular marquee tool was used to select the area below the horizon line and Brightness/Contrast was tweaked to give the shore more colour and definition.
Inverse
The Inverse tool allows
us to swap the selection between what's inside the box and what's
outside. It's handy if you want to select everything but...
This was done using the marquee tool to select the square in the middle, then the Inverse tool from the Select Menu, and Hue/Saturation to take out all the colour of the selected area.
Its a handy way to put
borders on images for greetings cards, for instance.
Feather
Feather is a tool that
softens the edges of a selected area much the same way we did with
the Hardness slider for the Clone Stamp tool. With Feather, you set
how many pixels the edge should fade out over.
Its another trial and
error thing but I have noticed that it's best to undo Feathering and
reapply the tool to change the number of pixels, otherwise the effect
is cumulative.
In this picture, I've used the Marquee, Feather and Inverse tools to create a square vignette. The colour was faded with the Brightness Contrast tool, moving both sliders to -100.
If you wanted a high key
Vignette (fade to white), move the sliders to +100.
Elliptical
Marquee
Photoshop doesn't limit
you to rectangular selections. There's an Elliptical Marquee tool
too. The selection technique is exactly the same as it is for
rectangles but the dotty line forms an ellipse touching the four
sides of the rectangle. So, if you want a round vignette...
Lasso
The Lasso tool is
basically a freehand selection tool. It takes a steady hand and you
have to do it in one go so it's quite tricky unless you have a Wacom
tablet, which I don't.
Here's an example anyway.
Lasso's don't have to be freehand.
There is a polygonal
lasso tool which allows you to join up a number of selected points
with straight lines. Here's a triangular example.
The best use of this that I can think of is selecting a building or similar man-made feature.
Magic
Wand
Almost as clever as the
name suggests, this tool can select multiple areas based on
similarity of colour. We can add or subtract areas from the
selection, alter the range of colour to be selected (tolerance),
select that colour range contiguously or for the whole picture. Loads
of options.
We've all seen this sort of image before. The Magic Wand tool allows you to do this for yourself.
Fiddly is just another
word for versatile. Keep telling yourself that and it won't seem so
bad... honest.
The Magic Wand is also
pretty much the best tool if we're trying to remove the background of
a photograph so that we can superimpose it into another picture. I
know you've all seen examples of that, especially with celebrities.
I'll do an example later because it requires tools I haven't
mentioned yet.
Transform
Selection
The Transform Selection
tool lets us stretch, rotate and move our selected area but
right-click on the selection and there's a whole menu of additional
features to Skew, Distort, scale, flip, etc.
Personally, I've never
felt the need, but I've done a quick example for you anyway.
If you use this tool, don't forget that you have to click on the tick in the menu bar to save your adjustments and get out of Transform Selection mode.
There's lots more that
can be done with selections but we're already way beyond anything
I've ever needed.
One reason I rarely need
anything more than the basic marquee is my preference for layers,
which, by a startling coincidence, is the subject of the next
chapter.