Using Select and Mask mode - Photoshop Tutorial

- In most cases, when I'm creating a selection, my ultimate aim is to use that selection as the basis of a layer mask. Either for a composite image or a targeted adjustment. And because of that, typically I don't worry about getting my selection absolutely perfect. Instead I'll create a basic selection then use that selection as the basis of my layer mask and then fine tune the result on that layer mask because then I can see the final effect, the adjustment or the composite and that gives me a better sense of just what I need to do to create that perfect layer mask. So, it's very important in many cases to have an absolutely perfect layer mask. I don't necessarily need a perfect selection because I have so much flexibility in terms of modifying a layer mask later in my workflow. That said, in some cases you may want to work with your selection to get it as accurate as possible and one of the ways you can go about that is the select and mask mode for modifying selections. The same mode, by the way, is available for modifying layer masks later in your workflow. But again, sometimes you may want to work directly with the selection. Let's take a look at an example here. I will use the quick selection tool and then paint across the sky above and below the bird's head here. That gets me a selection that's pretty good, but I have some areas of feather here that I need to clean up. So I will hold the Alt or Option key and then paint over those feather areas to subtract them from that selection of the sky. So, this looks to be pretty good overall, but of course, when we have fuzzy areas, hair, feathers or fur for example, we know that there's going to be a particular challenge and that's when some of the features of that select and mask mode can be especially helpful. So, with this selection active I'll go ahead and click select and mask on the options bar for any of my selection tools. That will put me into this special workspace for select and mask. And so the first thing I'll want to do is choose a view option, a preview option and generally speaking, when I'm working with a selection in select and mask mode, I want to use that overlay option so that I can see my quick mask mode overlay on the image itself, indicating the areas that are not selected versus the areas that are selected appearing in their normal color. Note that I can also adjust the settings for that mask overlay. I can adjust the opacity and the actual color for the overlay and I can choose whether the color indicates areas that are masked versus areas that are selected. So these defaults, I think, work perfectly fine. I'm happy with those so I'll leave them as they are. And then down below I can choose some settings under edge detection and this essentially allows Photoshop to refine the edge just a little bit in a somewhat intelligent way. So for example, I can turn on the smart radius checkbox so that various areas, whether they have a crisp edge or a fuzzy edge, will get a different effect and then I can increase the value for radius. You won't see any change up at the top, or very little change anyway, up at the top because we have a nice, crisp line there, but down in this area with the feather detail, as I increase that value for radius, you'll start to see that there's some modification to the edge of the actual selection. So, not too high value, maybe right about, a little less perhaps, right about there looks to be pretty good overall. In this case I'm going to reduce that radius value to a lower level than I might otherwise use in this image so that I can show you another tool for fine tuning that selection edge here in our select and mask mode as well. Scrolling down just a little bit, you'll see that we have some global refinements. So I can smooth. This is the same as the smooth command that is available for selections. I'll go ahead and zoom in on this feather detail area, for example and you'll notice that the selection edge is a bit jagged, of course, because of the feathers it needs to be. But if I needed to smooth that out, I could increase the value for the smooth slider and that will smooth out all of those little jagged lines. Now, in this case, again, that's not an improvement but in some cases you may find that smoothing that edge will actually help improve the quality of your selection. I can also feather that edge. I can apply a little bit of blending so I can expand that outward or pull it back inward. I'll go ahead and zoom out actually just a little bit so we can see some of the other impact of that feathering. If I increase too much, you'll see that that red overlay is expanding out into the sky. Indicating, of course, that my selection isn't all that accurate. So I generally don't wanna use too much feathering unless I really need it. The opposite of that would be contrast. So if I had a selection that was already too feathered, I could actually use contrast then to tighten up that selection edge. Now, of course if I'm using contrast it means I don't need feather, so I would never increase both of these values. I would either need feathering or need more contrast and I would choose depending on what I actually needed. But generally speaking, I would say you don't need the contrast setting because hopefully your selection wasn't feathered in the first place and you can apply that feathering right here as needed. So I'll use a very small degree of feathering there and then I can shift that edge. So with that feathering, I'm noticing that the selection edge here at the top of the beak for example, is going too far outside of the bird. I can shift that selection edge inward or outward. So I can use a negative value to shift outward in this case, or a positive value to shift inward, in the context of the bird, not in the context of the actual selection of course and so I can expand or contract that selection edge. So, right about there looks pretty good overall. But I still have some problems with the feather details down here at the bottom. As we saw earlier, I could probably use that radius setting to solve for that but there are a couple of other tools that I want to show you. We can use this refinement brush in order to essentially let Photoshop know that some refinement, some blending is needed in a particular area and we can also paint directly onto the mask. In fact I notice that there's an area up at the top here that could use some direct painting. And so I will choose that painting tool and then I could paint as needed. Notice that I have plus and minus controls or add and subtract up on the options bar. So right now I'm adding. In this case I want to subtract from my selection. My selection has expanded too far into the heron here. So with that minus option I can paint right along that edge and clean up that selection just a little bit. Now that is manually painting to change the form, the overall shape of that mask. I can also take that blending effect, that refinement effect with that second brush option, the one that has the hand attached to it and then I can simply paint over the feather areas and what I'm essentially saying to Photoshop is that we need a little bit of blending in those particular areas of the image and so you'll see that as I'm painting, I'm getting a blended, more of a sort of feathering type of effect. A blended effect but in a more intelligent way based on where I'm painting. So, all of those various options give me the ability to really refine my selection with some rather sophisticated controls. As I noted before though, generally speaking I would save those refinements for my layer mask rather than the selection. But it is worth noting that these tools are available for selections as well as for layer masks. Once you're happy with that overall result. When you think that you have refined that selection hopefully to perfection, then you can simply click the OK button to exit that select and mask mode and more importantly, to apply those changes to your actual selection.