› › THE PERFECT SELECTION> KELBY ONE.COM
[ 85 ]Once the Selection is active, let’s add a Hue/Saturation
adjustment layer. Go to Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Hue/
Saturation, or click the Create New Adjustment Layer icon at
the bottom of the Layers panel and choose Hue/Saturation.that will be produced. The great thing about this is you can
see the mask preview as a guide for what will be selected:
white for the selected area and black for non-selected areas.
ABOUT THESE OPTIONS
There are a few points about these selections that you should
be aware of. For instance, when you choose Highlights in
the Select drop-down menu, it instructs Photoshop to select
the brightest values. Then, as you increase the Range set-
ting, it will begin accepting tones that are slightly less than
the brightest values.
If you use the Shadows option, it will start by selecting all
of the darkest values, and then, as you increase the Range
setting, the mask begins including tones that are less dark,
adding those to your selected area.
Interestingly, when you pick the option for Midtones,
it doesn’t isolate only the middle values of the tonal
range. On the Ranger slider, there are two points instead
of one, and you can bracket tones you want to select
between those points; anything between those two val-
ues will be 100% selected. This is handy because it gives
you a great deal of control to isolate a tone in your image
for a selection.
Now when you’re looking at tones and shades in your
image, you could imagine it as a grayscale image, and make
a decision as to what range, or tone, is the area that you want
to select. The Range values align to the RGB 0–255 range of
luminosity, and the Fuzziness slider will feather the tones that
are being selected. This helps reduce some aliasing.
For this particular image, we want to add some warmth
to the rays of light and keep some of that atmospheric, or
foggy, feel in the image. (If you’d like to follow along with this
image, click here, and then click the Save to Library button.)
To do this, we’ll use the Highlights option, and set the Range
to 160 and Fuzziness to 85%. This will select the brightest
parts of the image, as well as include the rays of light that
are in front of the trees and other parts of the scene. Here’s
the Color Range dialog showing the final settings. When you
click OK, the selection is activated on the canvas.
The active selection you previously created with Select>
Color Range has now been converted to a mask for your
Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.