32
1
Choose Select > Color Range. The default setting will most probably be the last
color you selected, which we can ignore. I’ve turned on Quick Mask as a Selection
Preview, so we can see the selected area highlighted in red.
4
Rather than applying an adjustment
directly, it’s best to do it with an
Adjustment Layer. From the pop-up menu
at the bottom of the Adjustments panel,
choose Curves. Click half way along the
diagonal line, and drag up and to the left to
brighten: only the selected area is affected
by the operation.
S
ELECT COLOR, AS WE’VE SEEN, IS
an ingenious way to make discontiguous
selections of similar tones from all around
an image. Photoshop CS6 introduced two
enhancements that make the job even easier:
skintone recognition and face recognition.
This isn’t face recognition in the sense that
image libraries understand it, but simply the
ability to detect a standard facial configuration
and automatically add it to the selection.
The system isn’t perfect, but it gets us a
long way towards our goal – and it’s easy to
adjust the results afterwards.
In this photograph of Sarah Palin visiting
Kuwait, her face is largely in shadow – and the
face of the army officer striding along next to
her has almost entirely disappeared into the
shade. We’ll see how we can rescue this image
with the minimum of fuss.
The color of her face
IMAGE: US DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
1
Natural selection
SHORTCUTS
MAC WIN BOTH
33
5
Making an Adjustment Layer with an active selection
adds a Layer Mask to the adjustment. If we look just at
the mask, see the selected area is the white part of the mask.
Here, we can see that her pants have been selected along with
parts of the soldier’s uniform.
6
Painting in the mask on the Adjustment Layer in black
will hide the effect. So we can use a large, soft-edged
brush to paint over Palin’s arms and pants, to reduce the
brightening effect caused by the Curves operation.
2
Choose Skin Tones from the pop-up menu. Most of the
skin color in the image is in the selection – but parts of his
face are missing, and the wall is partially selected.
3
Clicking the Detect Faces checkbox modifies the
selection. The wall is now entirely deselected, and his
face is now fully added to the selection.
HOT TIP
This selection
method deals
with topics
we haven’t yet
covered in the
book. For more
on the Curves
adjustment, see
page 108; to
learn about Layer
Masks, see page
84 onwards.
You can view just
the Adjustment
Layer’s mask, as
we do in step 5, by
holding O A
and clicking on its
thumbnail in the
Layers Panel.
How to Cheat in Photoshop CC
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