- Reverse the selection. You’ll recall that what
we really want to select for our composite is
the manly saw and the manly hand wielding
it. So now that we’ve gone to such lengths to
select the background, choose Select→Inverse
to switch the areas that are and are not selected.
As you can see circled in Figure 3-29, the saw blade,
that troublesome area that caused problems earlier,
is still missing from the selection. Don’t fret and try
to slice things up with your incomplete power tool.
We can remedy the problem of the missing blade by
employing some of Photoshop’s other useful tools
in the next exercise. For now, press Ctrl-Shift-S
(�-Shift-S) and save your file as “My toothless saw.
Figure 3-29. psd.” Then click OK.
Quick Selection and the Quick Mask Mode
Adobe is slow to add selection tools. Seventeen years after introduc-
ing the world to the magic wand, it ushered in the speciously named
quick selection tool. (Little about its performance suggests that
you’ll complete your selection chores faster.) In contrast to the magic
wand, the quick selection tool is sensitive not to color ranges but to
edges, which are sudden transitions from dark to light. Paint inside
the element you want to select and Photoshop increases the selec-
tion outline to what it considers the outlying edges of that element.
In this lesson, we’ll take a look at how well the quick selection tool
handles our problematic saw blade from the preceding exercise.
We’ll use Photoshop’s venerable History panel to save selection
variations along the way, just to be safe. I’ll also show you how you
can check the quality of your selections by reviewing them in the
quick mask mode, and address any problems you might see there.
- Continue with the files from the preceding lesson. We’re
still trying to fix that selection outline we began in the
last exercise, so I’m hoping you still have My toothless
saw.psd and Ad composite.psd open and the selection on the saw
image still active. (If you need a catch-up file, open Toothless-
Saw image.jpg instead. Then choose Select→Load Selection,
choose Bladeless from the Channel pop-up menu, and click
OK to resume where we left off in the last exercise.)
80 Lesson 3: Making Selections
