Dave's photoshop Class: Selection tools

Today in Dave's Photoshop class, the lesson was all about selection which on the surface doesn't sound like much, but in actuality selection is one of the most important things you have to master in programs like photoshop, especially if you want to create anything of actual worth when it comes to manipulating or creating images.

The exercises Dav presented us started with the basic shape of a circle and then progressed to the letter "S", a printer, a car on a highway and a girl sitting down. (That's also in order of difficulty with the circle being the easiest and the girl being the hardest, hair can be a nightmare when it comes to selection). Not only did we have to cut out these objects and paste them on a black background which highlights the irregular shape defects caused by the selection tools but we also had to use the pen tool. A vector based tool that creates curves between points based on anchor points and takes a fair amount of fiddling to get right, even for seasoned pen tool users.

The following image is the black background with the objects unceremoniously pasted onto the surface to show our accuracy with the pen tool.

Selecting with the pen

The next task was to create an image where objects were pasted into the scene and made to look as though they were part of the original photo, for this a highway picture was given and the car was duplicated and enlarged slightly to account for the distance in space and then the edges were blurred to help get rid of the stick out effect that objects get when you place them in another scene. A plane was then finely cut from another photo and placed into the shot with the luminosity lowered to wash out the strong colours it came with originally. The edges were once again blurred so it doesn't appear as a copy/paste job.

I'm seeing double

That wraps it up for today's photoshop class, stay tuned as updates to the Schweppes advertisement progress are posted later in the week.