Complex Selections in Photoshop
- Making Complex Selections in Photoshop
- Mastering Complex Selections in Photoshop
Having the ability to effectively extract an image from its background is an essential skill for any designer, photographer, or creative professional. Many times we have unique challenges when attempting to separate a subject from its setting. Obstacles like poor contrast or the intricate shapes formed by hair and fur can make the process nearly impossible without the right techniques. In the first installment of Making Complex Selections in Photoshop, I covered fairly easy objects to select, such as a woman with a few wisps of hair sticking out, but this time we are going to cover making even more complex selections in Photoshop.
The example image below can be found here. To try and select each individual strand by hand would be extremely painstaking and nearly impossible. You could spend all day attempting to select this cactus with the lasso tools, and even revealing each strand with a mask would yield poor results. It would take hours to refine the mask for each strand by hand. Instead, select the Quick Selection Tool and make a loose selection of the object by clicking and dragging within the area. Hold Shift to add to the selection and hold the Option/Alt key to subtract from the selection. If you find that it’s taking too long to make a selection, increase the size of the Quick Selection Tool, as you would the Brush Tool, by hitting the ”]” Key, until you have a decent sized cursor. Hit “[“ to lower the size for more tedious areas. (If you’d like to learn more about helpful, time-saving Photoshop keystrokes, check out 30+ Time-Saving Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts.)
You can see from the image above that the selection is very loose. With the selection active, go to the Options Bar and click Refine Edge. The Refine Edge dialog box will come up, where you can refine and adjust your selection very precisely. Click the Smart Radius option to enable it, and move the slider all the way to the right. On more solid objects, be careful when using this, because it will take away solid, continuous areas of color around the edge that blend with the background color. However, this setting is perfect for fine, wispy hair or fibers. Click Decontaminate Colors and move its slider all the way to the right. This removes edges where the background color may have added a thin, unwanted fringe around the object.
You can see that the Refine Edge menu has already done a great job of extracting the fine, fibrous edges around the cactus. Hit the “F” key to toggle between views and you can see that the mask view of the selection is very intricate and precise.
Select Output to New Layer with Layer Mask. This will create a new layer above the working layer based on the mask that we just made and refined. If there are any problem areas, we can fix them, but in this case we have none. Now, you can place your selected object over anything that you’d like without color contamination or any other concerns.
The fuzziness is just as prominent as it was in the original image, but now we can slide any color or image behind our object and composite a layout quickly and easily. Below, I added a bold purple to show the quality and precision of this selection technique.