Creating an accurate selection with the Object Selection command - Photoshop Tutorial

- In Photoshop 2020, Adobe unveiled a new tool to select objects, and it's really a replacement for other methods. In the past you might of relied upon things like the Magic Wand Tool which allowed you to click, and it would make a basic selection, and you can continue to tweak the settings. Adobe then expanded this to the Quick Selection tool which allows you to drag through an image to try to make an even better selection. But now, they've replaced those tools, or at least demoted them, and have added the Object Selection tool. What you can now do, is drag around an object and it's going to determine, what's the primary area, in this case, it picked up the shadow a little bit, so you can subtract that, just hold down the option key, and it will attempt to remove, and it will recalculate. Let's try another object here such as these leaves. There we go, and I'll hold down the shift key and drag around this leaf, and you see it adds that too. This makes it really simple to go through and find objects, and you don't even have to be perfect when you make those selections. So in this case here, I'm just dragging on the leaves, and you see they begin to become selected because we have not completely selected the oranges. And so with that drag, it uses its intelligence to try to guess what it is you wanted to select. And pretty quickly, it builds up a relatively accurate selection and you can keep adding and dragging as needed. So for example, with that selection, let's add a curves adjustment here, and we'll take the on image tool and just do a little lift and you see that we added light to just the green vegetation there, helping those stand out, which was useful. Now what I want to do is make a section on an orange. So let's grab one of these, there we go, and we'll just make a basic selection here, around one of the oranges, and you see it finds it pretty well. This tool is designed to just look at the image and attempt to isolate things. Once it's done, you could choose the Select And Mask command and take advantage of things like smart radius, so it reanalyzes and recalculates. Feel free to use those, and then just output that to a selection. But now for example, we can add a change here, using HSL, and I can click with the Selection tool here on just the orange, and you'll notice that I'm making a very targeted adjustment to just the orange, it's both masked and it's using the HSL tool there so I can start to refine that, making it more of a tangerine for example, giving me a lot of flexibility. So this tool is very useful, just select the layer and drag around what you want, and what it's going to try and do is make a basic selection. So notice here, it's going to allow you to make choices, now sometimes it gets it wrong, like it did there on the edge, a little bit tricky, so it's not going to always be perfect, but you can go ahead and find that as you use this, you can select multiple areas, or if we drag through here and select all three oranges, notice how it analyzes and tries to find the right information. Now I generally find that using a smaller selection, choosing them one at a time, is going to be more accurate, but I could hold down the shift key there and it will continue to grab them, there we go, let's get that one there, and one more. Now, we'll add that HSL adjustment, click on the on image tool, and click on the orange itself. Boosting the saturation, and darkening or lightening ever so slightly, with a role to the hue, and as you see there, we were able to make some very targeted selections, affecting just the oranges, and the vegetation, so we can really drive that in, and get the look that we wanted, effectively relighting our photo. Be sure to explore the Object Selection tool, you'll notice that you can actually change it as well from a Rectangle to a Lasso, and I do recommend that you use the Auto Enhance options here, so it works well and will attempt to clean up the edges for you, but this is just a great selection tool. You can then combine this with other selection techniques as well as traditional ones to make more advanced selections using alpha channels to save those selections, and that refine command to really dial in the results that you want. But as an initial tool, it's a tremendous time saver and should become a replacement for the Magic Wand or Quick Selection tool.