From the course: Motion Control 3D: Bringing Photos to Life in Three Dimensions with After Effects and Photoshop CC (2019)

Making a selection based on subject, focus, or color

From the course: Motion Control 3D: Bringing Photos to Life in Three Dimensions with After Effects and Photoshop CC (2019)

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Making a selection based on subject, focus, or color

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Photoshop offers many different tools for making a selection. This next one doesn't work as well in an older photograph, but is often quite effective on modern images, and it allows you to make a selection based on the focus area. Under the Select menu here you'll see two choices. One is Subject, the other is Focus Area. If I choose Subject, it does a nice job of attempting to find the subject. The primary area that it thinks is the actual subject matter. And in this case it guessed the mountain in the foreground. This also works well for people. Let's deselect by pressing Command or Control + D. Now, I'll choose Select, Focus Area. This is going to evaluate the image and attempt to find what's in focus. You can choose how this is viewed here by looking at it in different ways. In this case, it determined that the foreground and the mountain were in focus. And this is quite useful to really view. You'll also notice that you can quickly jump into the Select and Mask workspace from here where you can absolutely take advantage of those same commands like Smart Radius with Edge Detection as well as Feathering or Contrast controls as needed to adjust the selection. And then with a single click, output to a selection or a layer or a mask. And you see that it generates a nice clean selection. One of my other favorites is under Select, Color Range. This gives you the ability to click on a color to make a selection. You can then make an adjustment here with the Fuzziness slider to affect more or less of an area. Additionally, if you hold down the Shift key and you drag, you see it starts to pick up more. Using that Fuzziness slider, you can quickly adjust what is or isn't selected. That works quite nicely. You'll also see from the Preset list the ability to target certain colors or even things like shadows, highlights or skin tones. So this can make it really easy for example to target just the clouds. By selecting the highlights and playing with my fuzziness here, I get a nice initial selection on the clouds. Then pressing Q for Quick Mask, it's really easy to view those where they can be refined. Taking advantage of these three tools under the Select menu are quite useful because they'll let you quickly make a selection based on different aspects of your source image.

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