Subtitles of the Movie

Welcome to this lesson on different Selection Methods. I want to start out with covering the other two Selection Tools here: the Freehand Selection Tool and Magic Wand and then go to some other ways we can make selections. Remember, selections based on the Selection Tool are shape-based, so you pick shapes up here in the Selection Type. Selections based on the Freehand Selection Tool are drawing-based and here you've got Freehand, Edge Seeker, Point to Point and Smart Edge. Edge Seeker, if I zoom in here on Grace, well, I've got to get out of this mode. Zoom in, click on Edge Seeker again. What Edge Seeker does is when I click and I don't have to even hold the mouse button down, but I click to establish my first point and then when I click on another point on an edge, this selection snaps to that edge based on the range and how much smoothing you apply. So in this case it's doing a decent job but nothing, you know, tremendously good. OK? So double click to close that off and there you've got a way of making a selection; best used for probably crisp, clean edges and not necessarily hair, like I have here. Control D to de-select. Now, Freehand is simply draw. So I can draw whatever shape, however I want to and that is the selection. Point to Point; instead of drawing like a curvy line, I click and I'm basically drawing a multi-faceted shape. This is also good for quick selections or for very straight line selections. Now, a lot of times you don't have to select something perfectly. What I'll do is go into my Point to Point Mode, quickly outline roughly what I want selected, close that off by double clicking and now I can copy and paste this or work with it, you know, like in a mask and then smooth the borders out later. OK? So I use these very, sometimes very quickly, quickly making selections. Smart Edge is similar to Edge Seeker and when I click and hold the mouse button down, you can see that border and anything within that border that looks like edge, when I click again, and in fact you don't even have to hold the mouse button down. I click once. Now I don't hold, I don't have the mouse button down. I'm going to click again, making sure that that rectangle is around the edges I'm trying to select and that then snaps my selection to the pixels in that box that looks like an edge. And that does a very good job. For these tools you've got Feathering, Smoothing Options generally, Anti Aliasing, whether or not to use all layers. That is, run the gamut then of Freehand Selection. Magic Wand is matching-based, so again you can choose Matching Modes, Color, Brightness, Traditional, All Opaque and so forth. Tolerance, which is one of the key values; low tolerance means you're looking for pixels that match this mode exactly. So if I'm in Color Mode with a Tolerance of five, those pixels had better be pretty close; within five. Otherwise they won't match. If I select 90, de-select here and go back in to select again, I'm getting most of the image. So again, there's no drawing here. There are no shapes here. It's all about matching. Choose your Matching Mode. All Opaque would select the entire image here. RGB Value, Tolerance of 16; let's click on her shirt and I get a pretty good selection. A lot of the times, what happens is I'll make a selection and then press Shift, make a selection in another part of the shirt to try to gather all that in. Sometimes you'll have to really play with the tolerance to get it right. De-selection now; Contiguous, if I uncheck that and press, click on Grace's shirt, here then it doesn't matter if the pixels are contiguous or not or next to each other. Wherever they are in the photo, they can be selected. You can see I clicked down way over here on the shirt and her lips are selected. Use that carefully. Alright. Those are the other two Selection Tools. Now, another way to make selections is the Text Tool. Click on the Text Tool and Create As. Instead of a Vector, Create As a Selection. Now, it doesn't matter what your Material Properties here are because when you apply, that's going to be a selection, which now means I can Copy, Paste as a New Image and you can see there's, the material on that layer is what forms the basis of that text. I can also make selections from any kind of vector object, which is very, very neat. Sometimes I'll use rectangles, but, you know, or other shapes but you might as well use your normal Selection Tool there. It's really cool when you use the Pen Tool, create a shape, let's say which matches the contour of what you want to select. And I'm just going to close this off now because I don't want to spend forever doing it. I just created a shape. Let's say you wanted to spend a lot of time masking out her body and face here. What I would do is create a mask from here on the Layers Palette, then create a Vector-Based Shape with the Pen Tool, drag that into the mask and then create a selection from this. So once this is selected, I can choose Selection from Vector Object. Now when I de-select my vector, I go to my background layer and hit my Selections Tool. That, I've successfully created a selection based on the shape of that vector object; very, very, very, very powerful. And again, the quick steps are creating a shape, choosing Selection from Vector Object and at that point you don't need the vector object any more so what I tend to do is toggle that visibility off. I go to the layer I want to copy or manipulate somehow. If you're still in the Pen Tool Mode, go to Selection Tool and you'll see the selection. Great. That concludes this lesson. Those are some alternate methods for making selections.