Master

Selection
Tools In
Photoshop
2020

Want to master selection

tools in Photoshop? Read this
book!

Deep Kumawat
 Copyright © 2019 Deep Kumawat

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or
by any means (electronic, mechanical,photocopying, recording or other-
wise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person
who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be
liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
For my parents who always supported me for
doing something different, something that I
wanted
 Contents
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi
Conventions used in this book. . . . . . . . . . . v i i

Chapter 1 Shape Based Selection Tools. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Marquee Tool. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Lasso Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Chapter 2 Color Based Selection Tools. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Quick Selection Tool.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Magic and Tool. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
Select Subject. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14
Select and Mask. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14
Object Selection Tool. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
 Acknowledgements

As a reader you never know what goes into writing a book. What
the writer has gone through before this. And without any doubt this
book is also not an exception.

There were only two people who were with me and supported
me and they were my father and English teacher(way back in the prima-
ry school).

By far the most supportive person in the journey of writing this book
had been my father. He trusted me and supported me throughout this
awesome journey of writing this book. He also taught me many aspects
of writing a book to publishing it by his own research. It seemed like he
was more exited about the book than even me! He is the only one who
supported me to do something out of the box.

There is one more person who is responsible for making this

book possible and she is my English teacher, Anamika ma’am in pri-
mary school. She praised my English compositions in class. Her praise
raised a believe in me that I would write a book one day!

v
 Introduction

Photoshop is an industrial standard software for editing
photos. After using photoshop for so many years I realised that
there is nothing that can’t be edit in an image with photoshop!

After reading this book you will master most of the major
selection tool in photoshop.

vi
 Conventions used in this book
In this book you will find some helpful convention pictures which would give
you tips, cautions, shortcuts etc. And they are as follows:

An easier and better way to the same thing

vii
Chapter - 01
Shape Based
Selection Tools

• Marquee Tool
• Lasso Tools
 7 Shape Based Selection Tools

Marquee Tool
Marquee Tool:- You can make some cool selections with it. The
shortcut key for it is ‘M’. If you would long press or right click on it’s
icon on the toolbar, you can also use elliptical marquee Tool, single row
marquee Tool and single column marquee tool. All these does the same
thing just the shape is changed.

Add selection
Subtract selection

Intersect with selection.

• With add selection you can add any part to an existing selection.

• With subtract selection you can subtract any part of any selection.

• With intersect with selection option selected all the parts of the
selection would be selected which are intersecting between both the
selection.

• Feather means the transition between the area which is selected and
the area which is not selected.

If you want to create a perfect square with the rectangular

marquee tool, you can do so by pressing and holding shift key
and then creating the square. This same applies to create a
perfect circle by the elliptical marquee tool.
Master Selections in Photoshop 2020 8

Lasso Tools
Lasso Tool:- Lasso Tool allows to make free hand selections.
It has an option called Anti-alias, what it does is that whenever you
make a selection it will automatically blends in the pixels resulting
into a great and smooth selection. Rest all the options for lasso Tool
are similar to in the marquee Tool. Shortcut key for lasso Tool is ‘L’. It
has two more Tools in its group.

Polygonal Lasso Tool:- This tool is used to select by joining

straight lines by clicking and creating breaking point. Let’s take an ex-
ample, you want to select a hexagon, what you need to do is just click
on each 6 six points and then click on the first point again, this would
make the selection.

Magnetic Lasso Tool:- This tool is very easy to use. To select

an object, just hover around the edges of that object and magnetic
lasso tool will automatically make selection around it as you hover.
It is not freehanded like the regular lasso to, but when you will use it
and hover around the object it would try to stick to edges automati-
cally. This why it is “Magnetic”!
 Chapter - 02
Color Based Selection
Tools

• Quick Selection Tool

• Magic Wand Tool
• Select Subject
• Select and Mask
• Object Selection Tool
Master Selections in Photoshop 2020 12

Quick Selection Tool

Quick Selection Tool:- The shortcut key for this tool is ‘W’.
This tool uses contrast to find edges and automatically sticks to
them. This sounds similar to the magnetic lasso tool but in that tool
you need hover over the edges but in this tool you will get a brush by
which you will click and drag on area which needs to be selected.

Brush options

Options for the Quick selection Tool

New selection
Subtract Selection
Add selection

You can hold the shift key to temporarily shift to the add
selection Tool and Alt(on windows) or Option(on Mac) to
shift to the subtract selection Tool. If you release those
keys you will return back to the new selection Tool.(This
technique works with all selection Tools.)

• Brush Options let’s you edit the brush size, hardness, spacing,
roundness and angle.

• Previously I explained you that this Tool uses contrast to find edg-
es, so its obvious that this Tool samples the layer. So, if needed you
can check the ‘Sample All Layers’ option. If you have not checked
this option it will only sample from the layer that you have selected.

• Auto Enhance just means that Photoshop would automatically

refine edges.
 13 Color Based Selection Tools

Magic Wand Tool

Magic Wand Tool:- Magic Wand Tool is used to select using
colours. What magic wand Tool does is that it samples the colours and
selected the similar colours in the image.

Select Intersection Size of sample

New
Selection Subtract Selection

Add selection

• Sample Size:- Previously I told you that magic wand Tool selects
colours but colours are made up of pixels. So, here you can choose
what you want to sample. For example, if you select ‘point sample’
it will sample the exact pixel that you clicked. Whereas if you select
something like ‘5 by 5 average’ what it would do is, it would sample
a square of 5x5 pixels and average it, from where you clicked.

• Tolerance:- Tolerance means how much colour variation would the

Tool tolerate. The lower the tolerance the more precise the selec-
tion would be. It means that, if the tolerance is relatively low then
it would only select the colours nearest to the colour you picked,
but if the tolerance is relatively higher then it would pick more col-
ours(it would tolerate the difference in colours more).

• Contiguous:- If this option is checked then you can click and drag
to select any and every area.
Master Selections in Photoshop 2020 14

Select Subject

Select Subject:- This option is available in both, magic wand

Tool and quick selection Tool. This Tool uses AI to know what is the
subject and selects it. Now you might be thinking that if AI can auto-
matically select the subject then why should we know all the selection
Tools? The reason is that this Tool is not accurate! In most cases it
would not give you a flawless selection. So, because of this reason
you need to know all the Tools, you don’t know when you will need
which tool.

Select and Mask

Select and Mask:- This is an amazing Tool for selection. Let’s

know more about it.
15 Color Based Selection Tools

Reset

Properties panel of select and mask

Master Selections in Photoshop 2020 16

• View:- You can change the view of seeing the selected area and
the area which is not selected.

• Transparency:- It controls the transparency of the area which is

not selected.

• Radius: It controls the radius of the refinement.

• Global refinements:- These are pretty straight forward so whenev-

er you use select and mask you can mess with these sliders.

Quick Selection Tool (W)

Refine Edge Brush Tool (R)
Brush Tool (B)
Lasso Tool (L)
Hand Tool
Zoom Tool (Z)

• Refine Edge Brush Tool:- This Tool is used for refining the edges of
the selection.

• Brush Tool:- It is used for making selections as if you were using

the brush Tool.

• Hand Tool:- It is used for moving within the canvas by dragging.

• Zoom Tool:- It is used for zooming in and out.

 17 Color Based Selection Tools

Object Selection Tool

The object selection tool was added in photoshop cc 2020. So
what it does? It selects the subject in the selection you make by using
artificial intelligence and machine learning.

You can select your mode to select the

region around your subject. You can choose
from Lasso and Rectangle.
New selection
Subtract Selection
Add selection

It would automatically
subtract unwanted selec- Refer the topic Refer the topic
Enhances edges tion of spaces between “Select Subject” “Select and Mask”
of selection an image

Mode: You can select from lasso and rectangle selection. Well
it means which type of tool you would be using for selecting the region
around the subject(The main selection of the subject in the selected
region would be done photoshop automatically through object selec-
tion tool.)
Master Selections in Photoshop 2020 18

Choosing Lasso as Mode for selection

Using Lasso tool as mode for object selection tool

 19 Color Based Selection Tools

Lasso as Mode: If you would take lasso as your mode, you would need
to make a rough(need not be very precise) free hand selection around
the subject. After you select the region around the subject, photoshop
will take a moment to process and then you will get a fairly accurate
selection of your subject with negligible efforts from your side! Note
that the selection will not be super precise you would still need to do
some tweaking.

You can use Alt or option key to switch to polygonal

lasso tool(press and hold it). You will get back to regular las-
so tool just by releasing the key. For rectangle as your mode
you can press and hold shift key to make a perfect square.

Rectangle as Mode: Let’s take an example. In the image shown

below, I want to select the man. All I need to do is to select a region
around him and photoshop would automatically select him. Isn’t that
awesome! Now, I am not saying that it is totally accurate but previous-
ly in older versions of photoshop I would have to make the selection
from scratch, atleast now I have a rough selection to start from.
Master Selections in Photoshop 2020 20

Selecting region around the subject with object selection tool

21 Color Based Selection Tools

Subject selected!
Master Selections in Photoshop 2020 22

Thank you For Reading!

Hope you learnt a whole lot from
this book about the selection
tools:)

If you read this book then I bet you want to learn more about Photoshop! So,
you would be happy to know that you can easily do that by reading my book,
“Photoshop CC 2020 for Beginners”, after reading that book, you would get fa-
miliar to all the major functions of Photoshop! It is available on amazon.com.