From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Advanced

Introducing the Color Range command - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Advanced

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Introducing the Color Range command

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- [Teacher] In this movie, I'll introduce you to the color range command, which lives here in the select menu. So you can see the color range and focus area are right next door to each other. Now if you've never used the command before, color range is sufficiently unusual that it's best understood in the context of the more familiar magic wand tool, which just so happens to be the tool that color range was designed to replace more than two decades ago and so here we have some fluffy clouds set against a fairly homogeneous blue background. And so you might figure the perfect way to select those clouds is with the magic wand. And so I'll click and hold on the quick selection tool and then choose the magic wand tool from the fly out menu. You'll notice our default settings are at work up here in the options bar. So the tolerance is set to 32, and both anti-alias and contiguous are turned on. And so let's say I go ahead and click somewhere inside this central cloud. Because the tolerance is set to 32, Photoshop selects 32 luminance levels brighter and 32 luminance levels darker than the click point as averaged on a channel by channel basis. Now if that doesn't select all the clouds, then I can press the shift key in order to display a plus sign next to my cursor and I could click again, but notice that you have to click. You can't drag with this tool. And if you do drag and then release, then Photoshop samples a single color at the point at which you release. Now in my case I'm not selecting all the clouds, so I might increase the tolerance value. Now notice when I hover my cursor over the word tolerance, I get this scrubby figure, which means that I can scrub the value higher or lower just by dragging on that word. And if you want to increase or decrease the value in larger increments, then press the shift key as you drag and that will change the value in increments of 10. Ultimately I'm looking for a value of 160 but notice that it doesn't affect the existing selection outline. Rather, it affects the next selection that I create. And so I'll just go ahead and click in this very bright area of cloud right there and notice that I select all the adjacent clouds but I do not jump across the sky to non-adjacent clouds. And that's because this contiguous checkbox is turned on. If I want to select all the clouds in one click, then I would turn that checkbox off and then click in this very bright cloud down here and that will go ahead and jump across the sky to all the clouds in the image. Alright now to get a sense for the quality of our selection, I'll go ahead and convert the background into an independent layer by double clicking on it here inside the layers panel and then I'll name this new layer clouds and I'll click okay. And then to get rid of the sky, I'll drop down to the add layer mask icon at the bottom of the layers panel and click on it. Now that gives us a pretty good sense for the quality of the selection which isn't looking all that great, but we'll get an even better sense if we set the clouds against a complementary colored background. And so the complement to blue, the color of the sky, is orange and to create an orange layer, I'll go up to the layer menu, choose new fill layer, and then choose solid color. And now I'll call this layer orange and press the enter key or the return key on the Mac, and I'll go ahead and drag this circle inside the hue field all the way to the top right corner and that'll give me a saturation, a brightness value, of 100 percent each after which point I'll just go ahead and change the hue value to 30 degrees which gives us orange and I'll click okay. Now of course the orange layer shouldn't be in front of the clouds layer so I'll drag it down like so and now we have a very clear sense for the quality of our selection. We do have a little bit of smoothness which is a function of this anti-alias check box being turned on. But it's not enough to make up for these jagged edges. Alright now let's see how that compares to the color range command. I'll zoom out by pressing control zero or command zero on the Mac, and then I'll duplicate this image by going up to the image menu and choosing the duplicate command, and I'll go ahead and name this guy color range clouds. And I'll leave this checkbox turned off because if you turn it on, you'll end up merging the two layers together which is not what you want. Now I'll click okay in order to create that duplicate image like so and now I'll right click on the layer mask for the clouds layer here inside the layers panel and I'll choose delete layer mask so we can start the process over. Alright just so we're not confusing things with the magic wand tool, I'll switch back to the rectangular marquee which you can get by pressing the M key. And then I'll go to the select menu and choose the color range command to bring up the color range dialog box. Now this guy can be pretty daunting because the options themselves are pretty opaque. And in our case, we're ending up with this black rectangle in the middle. This rectangle is a preview of our selection. The fact that it's entirely black tells us that nothing will be selected inside the image. And notice that's the case. If I click okay, I get this warning telling me that no pixels are selected, which obviously is not what I want. So here's what you do. Return to the select menu and once again choose color range. And then move your cursor out of the dialog box into the image window and notice that it changes to an eye dropper. I'll just go ahead and move this out of the way a little bit. All you need to do is click on the key color that you want to select. So in other words, we're clicking in order to begin a selection the same way that you do with the magic wand tool. And notice now this preview begins to turn white. And so anything that we're seeing in the preview that is white will be selected. Anything that's black is deselected. At which point, just to demonstrate what I'm talking about, I'll go ahead and click okay and we end up with this selection outline right here. Alright that's the basics, the very basics of using the color range command. But it gets so much better as I'll demonstrate in the very next movie.

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