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Essential Skills for Designers - Selecting People
Rating: 4.7 out of 5(78 ratings)
495 students

Essential Skills for Designers - Selecting People

Learn the best techniques to extract people from images in Photoshop.
Created byMartin Perhiniak
Last updated 11/2020
English
English [Auto],

What you'll learn

  • Learn how to make professional selections in Photoshop
  • Get from Zero to Hero in Photoshop selections in less than 3 hours
  • Learn to make selections the right way from an Adobe Certified Instructor
  • Put the techniques into use in Graphic Design or Photo Retouch projects

Course content

4 sections • 26 lectures • 2h 54m total length

  • Why do we need to make Selections?2:36

    Making Selections in Photoshop is really one of the most important skills you need as a designer, artworker or retoucher. There is a reason why there are so many selection tools and a whole separate menu for selection features. But why do we need to make selections in the first place and what makes it so complicated?

    As you probably know Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign all work with layers, which means you can place different elements like photos, illustrations, text and shapes on top of each other. Whenever you create a composition you will have to establish some sort of interaction between your elements. Like making a text seem like going behind an image. That adds some depth to your design and make it more engaging. Of course for this effect to work you will first have to create a selection of the person.

    Another example is a very common design technique called out-of-bounds or out-of-frame, where an image comes out of its frame. Again to make this work you first have to create a selection of the part of the image, which you want to extend out from the frame.

    Whenever you make selections in Photoshop you have to make sure that you do a good job and separate the selected part perfectly from its original background. You don’t want to make a selection when it looks obvious that it was cut out from another image. Also you want to keep your selection editable to be able to improve it at any later stage. Some selections are simple, but some of them can be very challenging. The difficulty of a selection depends on a lot of factors like the complexity of the selected part, the business of the background, the amount of contrast between the selected part and the background, whether there is hair or transparent details and so on and so forth.

    In this course we are going to focus on making selections of people, but the same techniques can be used to make selections of anything else. You will be able to learn all the professional techniques that will save you a lot of time and effort whether you are an artworker, graphic designer, web designer or photo retoucher.

    Let’s get started!

  • Exercise Files0:06
  • Lasso Tool7:27

    Master the lasso tool and its variants—normal, polygon, and magnetic—to form rough selections, refine with add or subtract, and smooth edges with feather and anti-alias.

  • Magic Wand5:52
  • Quick Selection Tool5:41
  • Marquee Selection Tools6:25

    Master marquee selection tools by drawing rectangular or elliptical selections, adding, removing, and moving with space, using fixed ratio or fixed size options, and transforming the selection.

  • Color Range5:52

    Master color range selection by using the eye dropper, adjusting fuzziness, and inverting or adding with shift, while balancing edges and combining with other tools.

  • Focus Area2:30

    Use focus area, a Photoshop selection technique introduced in the Photoshop CC 2014 update, to create precise, non-destructive selections by detecting in-focus regions in images with shallow depth of field.

  • Masking4:21

    Master masking techniques by converting selections into layer masks, using white to reveal and black to hide, refining with the brush, inverting colors, and saving masks for Photoshop workflows.

  • Pen Tool and Vector Mask4:40

    Master the pen tool to create precise vector masks, achieve hard-edge selections and soft-edge areas, and refine paths to control edges in image editing.

  • Refine Selection3:11

    Refine selections with the magic wand and adjustable tolerance, using shift-click to add areas; invert to view background, then refine edge with smart radius and save as a mask.

  • Custom Brushes5:06

    Create and use custom brushes to refine selections in Photoshop, using black and white to add or remove details, and save a hair brush as a tool preset.

Requirements

  • Basic Photoshop knowledge
  • Adobe Photoshop CS3+

Description

This course is the ultimate guide for making selections of people in Photoshop an incredibly important but tricky skill to master. Learn to use the tools and techniques the same way a creative professional would so you can do anything from basic selections of  person with one coloured background to very complex selections, with hair, transparent details and difficult backgrounds.

Making selections is part of most Graphic Designers and Photographers day to day workflow and mastering the correct way to do it now will save you a tonne of time and ensure you avoid bad habits later down the line.

This course focuses on selections of people but the same workflows can be used for making selections of objects, animals or anything else.


A closer look at what you will learn:

  • Firstly learn more about Selections and why making them is so crucial in creative work.

  • Then in the following chapter you will learn about the many different tools and techniques you can use to make selections:

    • Lasso Tool

    • Magic Wand

    • Quick Selection Tool

    • Marquee Selection

    • Colour Range

    • Making

    • Pen Tool and Vector Mask

  • Learn about each of these in detail. Each technique has its strengths and weaknesses so you will always be able to choose the right technique for the job your face.

  • Then move into learning how to refine existing selections you have made.

  • In the second chapter you will learn how to make more simple selections, with distinct background and well focused images.

  • Once you know how to make simple selections it’s time to move onto more complex images and techniques. Learn to select hair, transparent details and loads more.

  • Finally discover some more essential design tools including: keyboard shortcuts, resource websites and design terms to know and more.  


This course includes:

  • 21 Videos

  • 3 Hours of learning content

  • 1 Downloadable resource


Who will find it useful:

  • Anyone who wants to use Photoshop in a professional manner.

  • People who are aspiring to become professional Photographers or Retouchers.

  • Creatives looking to master a new essential skill and broaden their knowledge


A basic existing knowledge of Photoshop will be important when taking this course.


Martin is an Adobe Certified Instructor who has years of experience teaching  in both and online in classroom environments. He has also worked professionally in the creative industry for over 10 years on a wide range of projects. The examples and techniques used have been developed over this time to deliver the most efficient and enjoyable approach to teaching and learning.


Take this course to master an essential design skill and make selections the same way as a creative professional.


Who this course is for:

  • Anyone planning to improve their core Photoshop skills and learn some powerful selections techniques
  • Anyone interested in retouching photos
  • Anyone interested in Graphic Design
  • This course is good for beginner and advanced Photoshop users alike

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