ADVANCED IMAGE EDITING SKILLS
5
Lasso a selection
Press Cmd/Ctrl+D to deselect the marquee once you’ve finished
editing the selected area. The marching ants will vanish. Grab the
Freehand Lasso tool from the Toolbox. We’ll use this selection tool to
isolate and adjust the colours in a particular area. In the Tool Options,
set the Feather slider to 35 pixels for a nice soft edge to the selection.
Drag the cursor around the coloured flotation buoys at the right to
create a rough selection marquee.7
Magnetic selection
To make more precise selections, click the Magnetic Lasso tool’s
icon in the Tool Options. Set Width to 10 pixels to help the tool
stick close to the area that you draw around. A larger width will
allow the tool to stray off course. Set Contrast to 10%. Click the boat’s
window and draw around it. The Magnetic Lasso will automatically add
anchor points to help you draw an accurate selection marquee. Click the
last point on the first to complete the selection.6
Edit the selected area
Go to Enhance>Adjust Color>Hue/Saturation. By dragging the
Master Hue slider to -46 you change the colours within the
selection marquee without altering other colours in the rest of the
shot. Sometimes the selection marquee can be a bit distracting, so
press Cmd/Ctrl+H to hide the marching ants without dismissing
them. This makes it easier to see how the edited pixels are blending
in with the unedited surroundings. Click OK.8
Make selective tonal adjustments
Now that you’ve made a precise window-shaped selection, you
can tweak the selected area’s washed-out tones to give them
more contrast. Go to Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Levels. Drag the grey
slider right to 0.52 to darken the midtones inside the selected area so
that they match the darker tones in the windows on the left. Click OK
to apply the selective tonal tweak. On the following pages we’ll look at
more intelligent selection tools.