What You’ll Learn in This Hour:
<objective>Selecting different parts of an image using different tools
</objective> <objective>Modifying the selection area without affecting the image itself
</objective> <objective>Saving selections for reuse
</objective> <objective>Creating and arranging multiple layers
</objective> </feature>Selections set aside part of the image so that you can apply edits to it without disturbing the rest of the image. Using selections, you can smooth wrinkles from people’s skin without blurring their hair, change the color of a single apple on a tree, or remove backgrounds entirely and leave the subjects of your photos floating in thin air.
Layers are just as powerful, in a different direction. They enable you to stack image parts so that some objects appear to be behind others and so that you can work with the objects on each layer without affecting anything on the other layers. If you’ve ever done any scrapbooking, you probably have a good idea of how much you can accomplish by layering different objects.
Photoshop Elements offers you a cornucopia of selection tools: eight, in all (see Figure 7.1). Of those, five enable you to do all the work yourself, and three give you a little “magical” help. Let’s review.
The Rectangular and Elliptical Marquee tools are the basic tools—simply click and drag to create a selection. Photoshop Elements draws either a rectangular selection marquee or an elliptical one, starting where you click and ending where you release the mouse button. You can drag in any direction, and if you press Alt as you drag, the location of the initial click becomes the center of the selection instead of one of its corners. Finally, press Shift as you drag to constrain the selection’s shape to a square or circle.
Selecting with the Marquee Tools
Start this task with a new, blank image file. You’ll build a picture from scratch, using the selection tools rather than a brush.
Switch to the Rectangular Marquee tool.
Click and drag to create a tall, narrow rectangular selection (see Figure 7.2). When the selection is complete, drag it to the middle of the image’s canvas.
Switch to the Elliptical Marquee tool. Remember, it’s hidden under the Rectangular Marquee, so if you don’t see it, click and hold the Rectangular Marquee to display the pop-up menu.
Press the Alt key and hold it down as you draw a circle in the top of the rectangle; this actually cuts a hole in the existing selection. After you start drawing, also press the Shift key to constrain the ellipse’s proportions and make a circular selection.
Did you Know?
Sometimes it’s hard to remember which key to press to add or subtract from a selection. But you can always tell whether you’re in add or subtract mode while using a selection tool by looking at the cursor. The crosshairs is augmented by a small plus sign when you’re about to add to your selection, and a small minus sign when you’re going to subtract from it.
Cut out another circle in the middle of the rectangle, then a third at the bottom.
Switch to the Paint Bucket tool and choose Window, Color Swatches.
Click a black swatch and then click in the rectangular selection to paint it black (see Figure 7.3). Press Ctrl+D to drop the selection.
Switch to a red swatch and click in the top circle to paint it red; do the same with the middle and bottom circles to paint them yellow and green, respectively.
Hey, it’s a stoplight!
Did you Know?
If you feel that your stoplight should be measured more carefully and that all the lights should line up, you can take advantage of Photoshop Elements’ nonprinting gridlines. Choose View, Grid to display the grid; choose Edit, Preferences, Grid to change the frequency and color of the gridlines.
The Lasso tool works somewhat differently: With it, you can trace around the area that you want to select. When you release the mouse button, Photoshop Elements connects that location with your starting point to complete the selection. Lasso selections are great for encompassing irregular areas such as faces or flower petals.
Hidden under the Lasso tool are two variations on its theme: the Polygonal Lasso and Magnetic Lasso tools. With the Polygonal Lasso tool, you can’t draw curves—only straight lines. You define each corner of your polygonal selection by clicking, and you can close the selection by returning to your starting point or by double-clicking anywhere in the picture. Combining this behavior with that of the regular Lasso tool, the Magnetic Lasso enables you to click and drag, or click from point to point, or combine the two methods as you go along. Added to this flexibility is the fact that the Magnetic Lasso tool can detect edges and stick to them, making it ideal for selecting areas with distinct edges (see Figure 7.4).
As with the Magnetic Lasso, the Magic Wand and the Quick Selection tool can detect the colors beneath their cursors, and they can tell when those colors change at the edge of an object. The Magic Wand tool has been around since the earliest days of Photoshop, and it’s still one of the most useful tools in the Photoshop Elements toolbox.
To use the Magic Wand, simply click once on a solid-colored area anywhere in your picture. Photoshop Elements samples the color at the point where you click and enlarges the selection to include other similarly colored areas in the image. A few variables determine exactly how far a Magic Wand selection can grow:
Tolerance—. A value between
0and255, this number determines how similar in color pixels must be to be included in the selection. Lower values require colors to be extremely similar, and higher values allow more variation (see Figure 7.5).
Figure 7.5. The Magic Wand seems like the perfect tool to select the blue sky in this photo. On the left is the selection I got by clicking in the upper-left corner with a Tolerance of 20; on the right is the selection I got by clicking in the same place with a Tolerance of 40. Oops! The church’s doors and windows are selected because they reflect the sky; I’ll have to go back and remove them from the selection with another Selection tool.
Anti-alias—. This setting enables you to partially select the pixels along the edge of your selection. If you delete the selected area or paint in it, for example, the edges will be soft instead of hard and jagged.
Contiguous—. Checking this box requires selected pixels to be adjacent to each other. When it’s not checked, you can click on, for example, a pink flower on one side of the image, and all the matching pink areas in the whole picture will be selected.
All Layers—. When this box is checked, the Magic Wand selects pixels on all layers, not just the current one.
The Magic Wand and Quick Selection tools work very similarly. The main difference between them is that the Quick Selection tool uses dragging instead of clicking as its method of determining what colors you’re trying to select. As you drag the Quick Selection tool across an image, it evaluates all the colors it passes over and tries to work outward to the edges of the shape containing those colors (see Figure 7.6); it adjusts its own tolerance invisibly as it goes. You can accomplish the same thing by Shift+clicking repeatedly with the Magic Wand and adjusting its Tolerance setting—but using the Quick Selection tool is, well, so much quicker.
Selecting with the Selection Brush
As with the Quick Selection tool, the Selection Brush works via click-and-drag; you don’t just click as you do with the Magic Wand. The Selection Brush enables you to literally paint a selection—and erase it, too—until you’re happy with it. Let’s give it a try.
Click to select a picture in the Organizer, and then switch to Full Edit mode in the Editor.
Choose the Selection Brush from the toolbox; if you don’t see it, look under the Quick Selection tool.
Zoom in on an object in the picture that you want to select—maybe something you want to copy into another picture. Adjust the Size slider in the Options bar until the circular cursor is small enough to be able to paint over all the edge detail in the object but large enough not to take all day about it.
Click and drag across the object you want to select. As you drag, the selection grows and each click adds to it (see Figure 7.7). Keep going until you’ve selected the entire object; don’t worry if the selection overlaps onto the background a bit. Remember, you can change the cursor size while you’re working.
It’s time to clean up the selection. At the left end of the Options bar are two buttons: Add to Selection and Subtract from Selection. Click the Subtract button.
Now each click or click-and-drag of the mouse will remove any area in your selection that it overlaps. Go around the edges of the selection and remove any part that’s over the background instead of the object you’re selecting. You’ll probably want to use a smaller brush for this part of the job.
In the Options bar, take a look at the Mode pop-up menu. It has two choices: Selection, which is what you’re using right now, and Mask. Switch to Mask—and don’t jump out of your seat when all the unselected areas of your picture turn red.
Use Mask mode to further refine your selection. The Selection Brush works exactly the same way in Mask mode as it does in Selection mode, except that your selection is displayed as an unpainted area instead of bounded by the familiar “marching ants” of the selection marquee. I find it’s much easier to finish selections in this mode.
When you’re done, choose Selection from the pop-up menu or switch to any other Selection tool to turn your selection back into a marquee. Now you’re ready to copy, delete, or modify the selected area.
As you learned in the previous section, you can add to a selection by pressing Shift as you draw another selection, and you can subtract from a selection by pressing Alt as you draw. But you can modify a selection in many other ways after you create it. In this section, we go over your options.
First, let’s expand a bit on this idea of adding to and subtracting from selections. For one thing, you can switch Selection tools without dropping a selection, which means that you could create a selection with the Magic Wand and then add to it with the Rectangular Marquee, if you’re so inclined. I often use one selection tool for large areas and then clean up my selection using the Lasso tool or the Selection Brush.
You can also select the intersection of two areas. Imagine this: You select a square area with the Rectangular Marquee, and then you switch to the Elliptical Marquee and press Shift and Alt as you drag an intersecting selection across the first one. When you release the mouse button, only the overlapping area is selected (see Figure 7.8).
If you get tired of using the keyboard shortcuts for adding to, subtracting from, and intersecting with selections—or if you just forget the keyboard shortcuts, as I sometimes do—you can use the handy buttons on the Options bar that you saw in Step 5 of the previous task (see Figure 7.9). When you click one of these buttons, it stays active for that tool until you change it by clicking another button, even if you quit the Editor and restart it. You can use the buttons to set each Selection tool to a different mode, and switch back and forth among the tools to add to and subtract from selections.
Not surprisingly, the Select menu contains several useful commands for modifying selections. Each of these works only if you’re starting with an existing selection. Let’s take a look at them:
Grow—. To emulate the Magic Wand’s behavior, you can select an area of the picture and then choose Select, Grow. The selection expands to include all adjacent areas that are similar in color. The Grow command uses the Magic Wand’s current Tolerance setting, so if you don’t get the results you expect, switch to the Magic Wand and check to see what that value is. If you want to increase the size of your selection even more, you can choose the Grow command repeatedly.
Similar—. This command does the same thing as Grow, except that it acts as though it’s the Magic Wand with the Contiguous box unchecked. It selects similarly colored pixels throughout your picture, regardless of where they are. To invoke it, choose Select, Similar; choose the command again as many times as you want to enlarge the selection.
Inverse—. Choosing Select, Inverse selects everything in the picture that wasn’t selected before so that your selection is the reverse of what it was when you chose the command. You can also inverse a selection by pressing Shift+Ctrl+I.
Border—. When you choose Select, Modify, Border, Photoshop Elements creates a selection just outside the existing one, as wide as you specify in the Border Selection dialog (see Figure 7.10). The border width can range from 1 to 200 pixels. It’s automatically soft-edged, or feathered; to learn more about feathered selections, check out the next section.
Figure 7.10. Remember the selection from Figure 7.8? This is what happens if you use the Border command on it with a Width setting of 50.
Did you Know?
If you accidentally drop a selection, you can get it back by choosing Select, Reselect or pressing Shift+Ctrl+D. Photoshop Elements remembers your previous selection until you create another one.
Next we look at ways to work with just the edges of selections to customize them to your needs.
Making good selections is really all about the edges. You need to make sure you follow the line of the object you’re selecting perfectly, without any little jigs or jogs. You also need to be concerned about exactly where the selection is with respect to the edge of the object: just inside it, just outside it, or right on it. Finally, sometimes you need a selection to be soft-edged so that whatever action you take within it blends smoothly into the unaffected pixels outside it. Photoshop Elements provides several commands to help you accomplish these goals, as well as a handy all-in-one dialog box that packages all the commands together in one place. First, let’s look at the individual commands.
Three of them are found in the Modify submenu of the Select menu: Smooth, Expand, and Contract. Smooth asks you for a number of pixels and then deselects any selected areas with a diameter below that number, as well as any small protrusions or divots along the main selection edges (see Figure 7.11). This is a great way to clean up a color-based selection—that is, one made with the Magic Wand or Quick Selection tool, or with the Grow or Similar commands. Expand and Contract are simpler; choose one of these commands to increase or decrease the size of your selection by the specified number of pixels on each side.
The fourth command you can use to affect the edges of selections is Feather (located in the Select menu). This command uses Photoshop Elements’ capability to partially select a pixel to soften selection edges by “fading out” the selection toward its edges. When you choose Select, Feather or press Alt+Ctrl+D, you’re presented with a dialog box in which you enter the number of pixels wide you want the feather effect to be. The most common way to arrive at this value is by trial and error; you try a value, see how it works, and then undo it and try again if you don’t like it. At that point, you start wishing you could see what effect a feather radius value would have before you have to click OK.
That’s where the fabulous new Refine Edge dialog enters the picture. With any selection active, choose Select, Refine Edge. This dialog doesn’t give you any extra features over the individual commands, except for one very important one: a Preview check box. You can watch your selection change as you try different settings, so there’s no more trial and error involved; you don’t have to click OK until you’re happy with the modified selection.
Here’s what else you’ll find in the Refine Edge dialog (see Figure 7.12):
A Smooth slider that works the same as the Smooth command. The available values range from
0to100.A Feather slider, with a range from 0 to 250 pixels.
A Contract/Expand slider that can reduce or increase the size of the selection by up to 100%.
A choice of preview methods: Standard or Custom Overlay Color. With Standard, you see the customary “marching ants” selection marquee. With Custom Overlay Color, you see the same colored mask that appears when you use the Mask option with the Selection Brush. Everything outside the selection is covered in the masking color, and anything that’s not masked is selected. This viewing mode is particularly useful when you’re feathering a selection; you can really see how soft the edge is with different settings instead of having to guess.
Did you Know?
You can choose your own color by double-clicking the Custom Overlay Color Button; that’s where the word Custom in the name comes from. In the Custom Overlay Color dialog, click the color swatch to open the color picker, choose a new color, enter a percentage indicating how opaque you want the mask to be, and then click OK.
Selections are useful in many ways: You can cut or copy their contents, paste the contents of the Clipboard into them, and apply image enhancements and filters to the area they contain. But did you know you can also fill them up with paint? Or give them painted borders? Oddly, the commands to accomplish these two things are located in the Edit menu instead of the Select menu.
To fill a selection with paint, choose Edit, Fill Selection and make your choices in the Fill Layer dialog (see Figure 7.13). First, you need to choose a color or pattern to use for the fill from these options:
Foreground Color
Background Color
Color (This choice opens the color picker so that you can choose a color.)
Pattern (After you make this menu choice, you need to pick a pattern from the Custom Pattern menu below the Use menu.)
Black
50% Gray
White
After you’ve chosen the fill’s contents, you get to set a few other options, starting with blending mode. This setting determines how the new fill color is affected by the colors it’s covering; Normal means that it completely covers them. Feel free to experiment with different settings. If you’re really curious about how the different blending modes work, you can skip ahead to Hour 22, “Making Composite Images.”
You can also specify an Opacity percentage for the fill. Perhaps you don’t want to completely cover the existing contents of the selection; if so, choose a percentage less than 100. If the selected area has transparent areas that you want to keep transparent, check Preserve Transparency.
Applying a border to a selection works similarly. Choose Edit, Stroke (Outline) Selection and make your choices in the Stroke dialog (see Figure 7.14). Most of them are the same as the options in the Fill Layer dialog: Choose a color, choose an opacity percentage and a blending mode, and choose whether to retain transparent areas. Because you’re creating a border, you also have to decide how wide to make it, in pixels, and whether you want it to fall outside the selection marquee, inside the marquee, or centered on the marquee.
Think of a layer in a Photoshop Elements image as similar to a sheet of clear plastic, such as the ones used with overhead transparency projectors. When you put image elements on layers, you can stack and restack them to change which ones are in front of which other ones. You can also modify each layer’s colors, size, position, or special effects without touching the objects on the other layers.
Experimenting with Layers
Let’s take a quick hands-on look at how layers work before we get down to all the details. Make sure you’re in Full Edit mode and then try these steps:
Create a new document using the Default Photoshop Elements Size preset.
If you don’t see the Layers palette, choose Window, Layers to display it (see Figure 7.15). You’ll see one entry: the Background layer, next to a thumbnail image of what’s on the layer (which is simply a white fill right now).
Click the New Layer button at the top of the Layers palette to create Layer 1. The thumbnail for this new layer is a gray and white checkerboard, indicating that the layer is completely transparent.
Go back to the Background layer by clicking its entry in the Layers palette. Notice that the image doesn’t look any different as you switch layers; the only thing that changes is which layer is highlighted in the Layers palette.
Choose Window, Color Swatches to display the Color Swatches palette; then click to choose a color from it. Again, nothing changes except the Foreground color swatch in the toolbox.
Switch to the Paint Bucket tool and click anywhere in the image window. The Background layer is filled with the color you chose, and its thumbnail in the Layers palette changes to match. The Layer 1 thumbnail still shows transparency, which is why you can see the entire Background layer in the image window.
Switch back to Layer 1 and change the Foreground color again, to something that contrasts with the color you put on the Background layer.
Using the Brush tool, one of the Shape tools, or any other technique you prefer, draw anything you like on Layer 1. Notice that the Layer 1 thumbnail updates as you work (see Figure 7.16).
Click the eye next to the Layer 1 entry in the Layers palette. The shape you drew in Step 8 disappears because you’re hiding the contents of Layer 1. Click the space where the eye was to make the layer, and the shape it contains, visible again.
Most of the Layers palette’s functions are accessible in four ways: via the Layers menu, via the Layers palette menu, using buttons on the Layers palette, and using keyboard shortcuts. Whichever method works best for you is fine.
By the Way
All the functions in this section work with both regular layers and adjustment layers. An adjustment layer is one that doesn’t contain part of the image, but instead contains a modification to color or lighting that operates on the layers below it. We look at adjustment layers in Hour 22.
To create a new layer, do one of the following:
Click the New Layer button on the Layers palette.
Choose Layer, New, Layer and click OK in the New Layer dialog.
Press Shift+Ctrl+N.
Choose New Layer from the Layers palette menu and click OK in the New Layer dialog.
Double-click the Background layer’s thumbnail in the Layers palette and click OK in the New Layer dialog.
I won’t lay out all these options for each command in this section, but this list gives you an idea of where to go to find the layer functions you want.
By the Way
Drawing with a Shape tool or using the Type tool automatically creates a new layer for the shape or type to inhabit.
At any rate, when you create a layer, it shows up as a new entry in the Layers palette and becomes the active layer. It’s positioned just above the layer that was active before you created the new one (see Figure 7.17). New layers are usually given the name Layer and a number (shape layers are called Shape 1, Shape 2, and so on), but you can change a layer’s name by double-clicking the name and typing in a new one.
Did you Know?
You can also change a layer’s name in the Layer Properties dialog, accessed by clicking the layer’s thumbnail in the Layers palette.
Having created a layer, you can delete it by dragging its entry to the Trash icon on the Layers palette; by choosing Layer, Delete Layer; or by right-clicking its entry and choosing Delete Layer from the contextual menu. If you use either of the latter two methods, you’re asked to confirm the deletion by clicking OK; by contrast, using the Layers palette’s Trash icon doesn’t give you a chance to change your mind. Not to worry, however—you can always undo your action.
A layer’s most important attribute is its stacking order. The Background layer is always at the bottom of the layer stack, as shown by its position at the bottom of the Layers palette. The other layers are stacked on top of it in order, from bottom to top. You can move a layer in the stacking order by dragging its thumbnail to a new position in the Layers palette list (see Figure 7.18). The only place you can’t move a layer, in fact, is below the Background layer.
Did you Know?
If you absolutely must move a layer below the Background layer, first you need to turn the Background layer into a regular layer. Right-click its thumbnail in the Layers palette and choose Layer from Background in the contextual menu. Now, instead of a Background layer, you have Layer 0, which you can move like any other layer.
In addition to moving layers, you can combine them using the Merge commands. Merging layers into one makes sure that the objects they contain will move together, but you might also merge layers if you want them to have a single combined drop shadow or other layer style, for example. To combine a layer with the layer immediately below it, choose Layer, Merge Down, or press Ctrl+E (see Figure 7.19). Alternatively, you can select the layers you want to combine in the Layers palette (Ctrl+click to select more than one layer at a time) and choose Layer, Merge Down. Or if you want to merge all the layers that aren’t hidden, choose Layer, Merge Visible, or press Shift+Ctrl+E. Finally, you can combine all the layers back into a single Background layer by choosing Layer, Flatten Image.
If you have two or more layers that work together as a group, you can link them together so that one can’t be repositioned without taking the others along, or you can group them so that the contents of the upper layer are visible only where the lower layer has pixels.
Linking is simple. Shift+click in the Layers palette to select the layers you want to link; then click the Link Layers button at the top of the palette—it looks like a three-link chain. When they’re linked, layers move together until you unlink them.
Grouping, on the other hand, is a bit more complicated. You can group more than two layers, but let’s start with two for the purposes of explanation. Of these two, the lower one is being used only for its shape, not its color or pattern, and the upper one is being used only for its color or pattern, not its shape. To group the two layers, Alt+click the line between their entries in the Layers palette, or click the upper one and choose Layer, Group with Previous (or, if you prefer, press Ctrl+G). The upper layer hides the contents of the lower layer, but the upper layer’s shape is now determined by the nontransparent pixels on the lower layer (see Figure 7.20). To ungroup layers, Alt+click again on the line between the two layers, or choose Layer, Ungroup.
If you need to peek behind a layer, it’s easy to hide it by clicking the eye icon next to its entry in the Layers palette; to show it again, click the empty space where the eye was. If you press Alt as you click, you hide or show all the layers except the one on which you’re clicking. Be aware that you can hide the currently active layer, and you can’t paint (or do anything else) on it when it’s hidden; if you try, you’ll see a dialog box asking if you want to make it visible.
One of the coolest things about layers is that they don’t have to be opaque. You can determine how transparent each layer is by setting an Opacity percentage at the top of the Layers palette, allowing some of the contents of the layers below to show through (see Figure 7.21). Each layer has its own blending mode, which you can also change; to learn more about blending modes (now, say it with me), turn to Hour 22.
In this hour, you learned about the wide variety of Selection tools that Photoshop Elements offers. You used those tools to make selections and then to add to them, subtract from them, and reshape them in other ways. You also learned how to soften the edge of a selection through feathering. You saw how Photoshop Elements can help you make selections based on color or shape. And you looked at layers and learned about three kinds of layers—regular ones, Background layers, and adjustment layers; you also learned how to create, delete, and move layers.
Try answering these quiz questions to see how well you understand the selections and layers information we covered in this hour. Then give the activities a try for bonus points.
It’s time to practice adding and subtracting to selections. Create a new, blank document (the Photoshop Elements Default Size preset is fine) and make a big circular selection in the middle of the canvas. Then press Alt and make another smaller circular selection in the middle of the first circle. Now choose a nice golden brown from the Color Swatches palette, switch to the Paint Bucket tool, and click to fill the selection. Check it out—a doughnut! What other shapes can you make by adding to and subtracting from simple geometric selections?
Choose a photo in the Organizer and switch to Full Edit mode. Use a Shape tool to draw a rectangle, circle, star, or other shape in the middle of the image. This automatically creates a new layer for the shape to sit on. Now right-click the Background layer’s thumbnail and choose Layer from Background. Having done that, you can Alt+click the line between the two layers in the Layers palette to group them. Now the photo fills the shape, with the checkerboard pattern of transparency surrounding it.