- Grab any stray blobs with the lasso tool. The magic wand tool
did about as good a job as it’s going to, so it’s time to clean up
the remaining areas by hand. While the lasso tool may not be
great for intricate freehand selection drawing, it’s handy for
quickly incorporating stray areas into your selection. Press the
L key as many times as needed to grab the lasso tool, press and
hold the Shift key, and then draw around any stray blobby areas
you may still have in the sky.
As you learned in the previous exercise, pressing and holding the Shift key
while employing a selection tool adds to your selection. Pressing and holding
the Alt (or Option) key subtracts from your selection. This is true of all the
selection tools except the quick selection tool, which adds automatically, as
we’ll see in the next exercise.
- Clean up the upper-right side with the rectangular marquee
tool. The rectangular marquee is an indispensable tool for
grabbing large areas of a selection when precision isn’t an issue.
In this case, it’s perfect for those last remaining areas in the
branches. Press the M key to switch to the rectangular marquee
tool, press and hold the Shift key, and drag to select the final
stray areas along the right edge of the image. The red dotted
line in Figure 3-28 indicates the part of the selection I’ve added
with the marquee tool.
Figure 3-28.PeaRl Of WISDOm
The exact shape of your selection is likely to
vary from mine, given that the magic wand
tool calculates according to the luminance
value of your click point and it’s unlikely that
we clicked the same spot on the image. Don’t
worry if your selection has more stray blobs
than mine because you can use the tools in
the next steps to suit your particular needs.
And if your selection is more complete than
mine in terms of grabbing the sky, smugly
relax through the next two steps while the rest
of us clean up the last bits. Well, don’t get too
smug; these are handy tools to know the next
time your selection is less than pristine.New addition to the
selectionSelecting Regions of Continuous Color 79