Adobe Photoshop CS5 Tutorials
Working with Selections / Creating Elliptical Selections
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS5 / Working with Selections / Creating Elliptical Selections)
Now what I'd like to try and do here with you is start you off on some of the more simple selection tools and then we'll get more and more complicated as we go here. So, as I say, we're going to try and make a, sort of a cartoonish looking face out of all these metal parts here. There's going to be a lot of zooming in this exercise, a lot of Ctrl- or Cmd-Plus and Minus, or you can use your Ctrl- or Cmd-Spacebar, this sort of thing, so I'm just going to zoom in on my metal parts here. It's one of these two washers that I'm really after. I think I'm going to go with the top one here, but you can use whichever one you want, so you might want to just zoom in a little bit on this washer. I'm going to start off with creating the face's eyes. So, what we're going to do is we're going to learn how to create Selections based on shape to start off with, so obviously here we have a circular shape. Now over inside the Toolbox we have some selection tools that are going to help us create selections based on shape hidden underneath the Rectangular Marquee Tool we have a tool called the Elliptical Marquee Tool, oftentimes I simply refer to him as the Circle Selection Tool, or the Circular Marquee Tool. But, anyway, this is the guy that we're after, so go ahead and grab this guy out of your Toolbox. And essentially what we want to do is we want to click and drag out an oval with this guy or a circle with this guy, so usually what I do is I start above and to the left of the object that I'm after and then I click and drag and I just kind of, quite honestly between you and I, I just hope for the best. Now, as you can see, as soon as I click and drag with the tool I get some marching ants, which is fantastic, but you can see my actual selection is off. I didn't do a very good job of trying to select this rusted metal washer. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to try and take another stab at it here. I'll take another run at it. So what I'll do is I'll just bring my cursor outside of my marching ants somewhere, anywhere really and just single-click and that will get rid of the marching ants for me, so that's kind of a quick way to get rid of your selection. And then I'll simply take another run at it. So I'll simply bring my cursor back up above and to the left of my object and click and drag again and actually I've done a fairly good job here which is quite surprising. Now, you know what's cool, by the way, is I haven't let go of my mouse just yet. I'm still, you know, sort of clicking and dragging here if you will with the mouse, and what I'm going to do is I can hold down the Spacebar and now I can move my selection as I'm creating it, which is awesome. So I can kind of, you know, kind of position it up a little bit. Maybe if it's just off a little bit and then as soon as I let go of the Spacebar I can continue dragging out my marching ants. So, just kind of a neat little trick there for you, holding down the Spacebar, allowing you to reposition your marching ants and then getting your selection as best as you can. You know, if this is your first time using this tool you might have to take a second or a third or a fourth run at trying to select this metal washer. It can be a little bit frustrating, but try to be patient with it. You've never done it before, right, so of course it's going to require a little bit of practice but hopefully you're doing an OK job there. Now, you know, the other thing that I want to show you is this. Obviously I don't want the center of the washer to be selected. This is background, right? I don't want that in there, so I want to show you a very cool trick for removing an area from a selection. This is a perfect case, a perfect situation where I'd want to do this. So, in other words, I want to subtract out this center from my washer. How do you do that? Well, here's a neat trick that you'll want to jot down in your notes. If I hold down the Option key on the Mac or the Alt key on the Windows side notice my cursor changes. It's now a crosshair, but now it has a tiny little Minus sign, suggesting that if I click and drag I would be subtracting from the current selection. So, here's two things that I'd like you to remember. Holding down Alt or holding down Option is going to subtract from a selection. Holding down the Shift key would add to a selection, so I can always add to and subtract from the selections that I make here inside Photoshop. So you might want to jot those two little tricks down in your notes here. In the meantime what I'm going to do is I'm going to do my best here to try and select the center area of this washer. Again, just by kind of coming above and to the left of the center object there, anyway, of my washer and I'll click and drag out and hopefully I'll do a half decent job here. Again, I'm using my Spacebar trick to help me position things up. Now, again, mine isn't perfect but I'm trying to do the best I can here for you. There. Something like that. And as soon as I'm happy all I'm going to do is simply let go of the Option key here on the Mac, let go of the Alt key there on the Windows side and voila. Hopefully you have a decent looking selection here. OK, now the big thing. How do we now take this object and yank it off of the background and move it around inside Photoshop? Well, that's what we'll take a look at next.
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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