Adobe Photoshop for Beginners: Select and Mask

In today’s lesson in the Selections and Masking group of videos, we’ll be learning how to use the select and mask function in Photoshop.

If you’d like to see the rest of this tutorial series, you can do so here.

In today’s lesson we will be using the following assets:

What we want to do first is use the quick selection tool and make another selection from the flower image. Remember to use the bracket keys as a shortcut to increase and decrease the size of your tool when selecting. That is a fairly easy thing to select because for the most part, it’s one image contrasted well against another.

But this time we’re going to take the image of the model and remove the background, replace it with another background and then select and mask out the previous background so it looks realistic.

This is a much bigger step to learn and now that Photoshop has select and mask, the task of masking things out using complex images with hair or grass has become a lot easier. It used to be almost impossible to make clean selections prior to select and mask being added and refined in Photoshop.

So we want to add a mask to our image and then load the new background image we want to use. We will begin with using quick select to mask the model and then go into select and mask to refine the edges with those tools. It might take you several attempts to get it looking reasonably okay.

When you’ve completed the steps using select and mask, don’t forget to use the option “decontaminate colours”. With a blue background and black hair, you’re going to see the colours bleeding into each other. To resolve that, make sure you have the “decontaminate colours” option checked.

What you should end up with is something like this:

Created by Darkside Creative

And that’s the lesson! How well did you do? Let me know in the comments!

Also, please let me know if you’re following this tutorial series or if you have any comments or questions about any of the art on this blog. I’d be keen to discuss with you!

Until tomorrow, stay safe out there, keep creating and I’ll catch you in the next post!

If you like my Photoshop posts, you can check out more of them right here.

And while you’re there, why not consider following me which you can do here.

Thanks for your support!

5 thoughts on “Adobe Photoshop for Beginners: Select and Mask

  1. I like the tutorial, as a fussy 3d artist, I would notice the lady is front lit with the sun behind her and the camera is focused perfectly on her and the sea way behind her, LOL.
    The link doesn’t work for me. Best I go make some Star Wars art and stop being such a critic 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Hey Neil 🙂 No I appreciate your criticism 🙂 I can still see that the image isn’t perfect lol and you’re right about the lighting 🙂 There are other courses that I hope to do which are hours long for just creating one image lol. But I want to get these beginner courses out of the way first and move onto the harder stuff with my readers 🙂 Definitely put up your Star Wars art and then I can add it to my community post 😀

      Like

      1. Hi Julie I will have to create the art first. Hard edges are the usual give away on layers. I used to love using Photoshop, my daughter got quiet good with it at one point.

        Liked by 1 person

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