Subtitles of the Movie

Well in the next set of tutorials, I want to talk about some of the various selection tools and techniques that we can employ in Photoshop. In Photoshop, like in many other imaging applications, a selection is an isolated area that you can then do something to. Such as copying this cow by creating a selection and then going to another document and pasting the contents of that selection into this other document. Or if I have this selection active I could fill with a solid color. Or I could run a Photoshop filter. In essence the selection isolates an area for the next effect that you apply to it. With the concept of selections in mind, know that converse to a selected area is an unselected area. So if we have a selected area by default that means that, we have an area that is not selected or protected. So, when we run this Photoshop filter such as inverting the brightness value it's not technically a filter, but you get the idea - notice that everything outside of my selection was unaffected. Or protected is another way to think about. So I'm going to undo that effect. Another feature of selections, is that I can save the selections as a mask channel. So you can see that I have a mask here, I've just saved that selection off as it's own data channel. And at this point, I could edit the mask using any of my painting tools, and then reload this mask as active selection. So you can't think of a mask as a passive version of a selection. You can't really do anything with a mask except edit it. And then load it again as an active selection, and then do something such as invert the brightness values or whatever. Another feature of selections is understanding which one of the many selection tools to use for which type of image. So you can see here that if I wanted to select the tree, the correct procedure for this type of image would be really to select the sky, and then under the select menu do something such as inverse the selection, so it swaps the selected area for the unselected area. And now of course I could copy the tree, and paste it on a different image. Sometimes we might not use one of these selection tools. We might use one of the tools found under the select menu, such as selecting a color range. And then with that selected, I could of course paste that data on a different document. So there are many different techniques and ways to select areas, and the more you are familiar with Photoshop, the more you will be familiar with which is the correct tool to use. And before I finish this tutorial I want to point out one last thing. On my snail image, I actually have a vector-based path. And one of the features of my vector-based path is, of course I can convert this vector-based path into a selection as well.