Subtitles of the Movie

When you use Photoshop, you are almost always going to want to isolate an area to do something with. And this is integral to understanding how Photoshop works. It's almost always a two-step process. You select an area, and then you do something with the selection. And to demonstrate that, I will go over to my lasso tool and create a very crude selection. So I have selected my lasso tool and I am clicking and dragging around my apple here. Step 1 - I have a selection. And step 2 - I will do something to it such as invert the brightness value. I will undo that. So just to reiterate, and this is a very important point I want to make, is that the way Photoshop works is always a 2-step process. Select an area, and then do something to it. Select an area, copy and paste, and of course when I do that I actually paste into a new layer. Well Photoshop gives you many different ways to select an area. And I should also mention that if you don't have anything selected, then the default for Photoshop is selecting everything. So with this layer selected, if I choose to invert the brightness value, it will do that on every pixel - because the default is to run the effect on everything if there is no area selected or isolated for Photoshop to know that that's where you want to run the effect. I am going to demonstrate how some of these selection tools work, and I will start by using the rectangular marquee tool. Rectangular marquee tool allows you to create rectangular selections. So with my rectangular marquee tool selected, I am going to click and drag diagonally over an area. And when you let go, you can see that that is the area that I have currently selected. If you move the selection tool into your selection, you can see I get this icon. And what this means is, this allows me to actually move my selection area without moving any data in it. So this is not editing my picture, this is just repositioning where I want my selection to be. I could add to my selection by holding down the shift key or by going up and choosing this icon right here. And if you have tool tips enabled and you move over that icon, you can see that what that does is it adds to the selection. So in the old Photoshop you had to know the key command, now you can just choose what option you want. So now I can click and drag, and you can see my selection has been edited with this new additional area. I can also add portions to the selection that are outside this. Conversely I can take away from this selection. Also notice how my cursor has a small plus next to it when I am in the selection add mode. I am going to choose to take away, and now my cursor has a small minus next to it. And you can see that I have just taken away from that selection. This last option will give you the intersection of whatever you have deleted from. So with the selection active, I am going to go over to the intersection option. And you can see what it's done - it's left the intersection of those two selections. I'm going to choose Select menu>Deselect, or command or control + D to get rid of that selection. Some other features and options available to us in the Selection Options palette are the ability to feather or soften the edge of a selection. That's this value right here - and currently the value is setup to be pixels and I will leave it at 0 pixels, create a selection, and fill that selection. So I will choose Edit menu>Fill, and I will choose it to fill with my foreground color which is this pink color. And you can see it's created a very sharp edged selection. Now if I edit this value, and I will type in 10 pixels now, so now it's going to create a 10 pixel feather for my fill. I will come over here and I'll drag out a selection diagonally, and since it's a square selection, my feathering has actually softened the edges a bit, and I will fill that again to show you the difference. Edit>Fill - foreground color, select none. So you can see, it's created a much softer edge. I will go ahead and bring that back to 0, and show you some other options that we have with the selection tool. If you hold down the Option key on a Macintosh or the Alt key on Windows, you can drag a selection from the center. And that's different from normally, it drags from edge to edge, and I always select and drag diagonally. So again that's holding the Option key down before you begin to drag a selection. With my style selected as normal, notice I can resize and reshape my selection on the fly. However, if I hold down the Shift key while I drag diagonally, it will constrain my selection to a perfect shape. And in the case of my rectangular selection tool, it will constrain it to a square. I can perform that same function by choosing to constrain the aspect ratio. And if you type in 1 for width and 1 for height, you will get the same effect, the square. And you can go ahead and change those numbers if you wish. I will change it to 3 for the width and 1 for the height, and I will get a very long selection - and notice it's always constrained to a 3:1 ratio. The last option I have under style is to choose a precisely fixed size. Type in exactly how big you want it, say you wanted a 32 X 32 - that would be a 32 pixel and I will type in px for pixel, so size selection. And now all you need to do is simply click, and you'll instantly have a 32 pixel square selection. So that's called fixed size. So there are several different options that you have with the selection tool up here available to you in the Options palette. And you will see how these work and other selection tools - they work essentially the same way.