Adobe Photoshop CS5 Tutorials
Photoshop Masking Techniques / Saving & Reloading Selections
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS5 / Photoshop Masking Techniques / Saving & Reloading Selections)
Alright, how's your Buddha looking? I hope it looks half decent. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect, just something that we can work with here and once again, another gentle reminder of the same thing here. Really what we want is a nice, crisp edge. You can see that I've gone all the way around the sort of the contour of the statue. I really haven't done much in terms of the interior of the statue. It's that outside edge that I want to make sure is in place so I'm going to show you how to clean up the inside very quickly in just a little while. But at this point, I'm happy with what I've done here. I hope you've enjoyed the Quick Mask Mode inside Photoshop and again, it's such an awesome way to create selections. Now what I want to do is I want to save my selection. So what I'm going to do is I'll head back into regular old Photoshop just by hitting my Q Key on the keyboard and what I want to do now is, as I say, save this selection so that it becomes part of my file. Now, just so you know as well, as I started working along inside the Quick Mask Mode, I though you know, I should probably save my file. So I renamed my file, I chose File Save As and I saved him as Buddha.psd and I stuck him on my Desktop along with our statue if you remember, that composite image we created way back when. So that now the selection that you and I have been working on is going to be saved along with our file after this next step and what happens here is the selection gets saved as something called an alpha channel. Now, I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. Let's go and save our selection here first and then we'll talk about alpha channels. So I have my marching ants here. They're not perfect but that's fine. I'm going to head up to the Select Menu, all the way up at the top and then the very last command, Save Selection. Go ahead and choose that guy and we wind up with this Save Selection Dialog Box. What file do we want to save the selection in? Well, obviously this one, Buddha.psd in my case. The channel, make sure that's set to New. Now, what's up with channel? You'll see how that plays out. And then it's prompting us for a name so I'm simply going to call this Buddha. How's that? OK. And the operation here, New Channel, that's fine. I'm going to go ahead and click on OK. Alright, now I'm just going to switch over to my move tool for a moment. Now, the next thing that I want you to do and I want you to trust me on this, is we're going to deselect. We're going to get rid of our marching ants, even though you and I have spent a whole bunch of time creating the perfect selection here or the near-perfect selection. I'm going to get rid of my marching ants. So in other words, if we hadn't saved our selection and we lost our marching ants, you and I would have to start all over again from scratch, which his brutal. I've done it in the past, it's awful, it's a horrifying feeling to have to start all over again but you and I just saved our selection so that means at any point now, now that I've saved my file as a .PSD, a week from now or a month from now I can come back to this file and I can reload those marching ants at any point, which is awesome. So check this out. I'm going to go back to the Select Menu and then down to Load Selection and inside the Load Selection Dialog Box, the document that I want to load the selection from is this one. The channel that I want to load in is Buddha and notice I have the option to invert the selection as well so maybe I don't want the statue to be selected, I want the background to be selected. So anyway, I'm going to make sure that that's unchecked and then go ahead and click on OK. Alright, there's our marching ants back. You know, many, many years ago when I first got into saving selections, I was scared to death to deselect because I didn't want to lose my marching ants and then I realized I can pull back my selection whenever I want. So maybe I run a couple of special effects or maybe I apply some color correction and then I get rid of my marching ants and then next week I come back and I go Select and I go down to Load Selection, grab my Buddha channel, my saved selection and click on OK and he's back exactly the way that I left him. Perfect. Alright, now go ahead and deselect once again, get rid of your marching ants. I now want to show you exactly what's going on here. I said this earlier and again, I was kind of getting ahead of myself but Photoshop saves this selection as something called a alpha channel. So let's go and take a look at that alpha channel, let's see what we can do with it and let's see if we can clean up our selection and make it perfect.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS5 |
| Author: | Geoff Blake |
| SKU: | 34150 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-46-1 |
| Release Date: | 2010-08-06 |
| Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 95 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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