ADVANCED IMAGE EDITING SKILLS
1
Change the Magic Wand settings
Open the image of the lake and go to the Expert mode. Choose
the Magic Wand, then go to the Tool Options at the bottom.
The Tolerance slider makes the Magic Wand tool more or less
sensitive. The correct amount depends on the image. Too low and it
won’t pick up enough, too high and you’ll include unwanted areas.
To see how it works, set Tolerance 10 and click the clouds. Now set
50 and click the same area to see the difference.3
Improve the edges
Once the selection is made, the edges will typically be hard,
so unless we improve them, any changes we make will look
obvious. We can improve the edges with the Refine Edge command.
Click the Refine Edge button in the Tool Options. As well as simple
adjustments like Feather, which softens the edge, there’s also more
intelligent commands like Edge Detection. Check Smart Radius and
drag the Radius to about 50px, set Output to: Selection and click OK.2
Select the sky
Try making a selection first with Contiguous checked, then
with it unchecked. Notice how, when checked, the selection
is constrained to one area. If unchecked, the tool seeks out similar
pixels over the entire image, not just those connected to the point
you click. Set Tolerance 23, check Contiguous and click the clouds.
Like any selection tool, you can hold Shift to add to the selection.
So hold Shift and click until the entire sky is selected.4
Adjust the tones
Now we’ve isolated the sky, we can improve the tones. There
are several ways to do this. You could go to Enhance and
experiment with the tonal commands, but for greater control, you can
turn the selection into an adjustment layer. Go to the Layers panel
(Window>Layers), click the Create adjustment layer icon and choose
Levels. A Levels layer appears, with the selection now as a layer mask.
Adjust Levels to improve the sky. Set black point 20, white point 189.