- 1. Take Care When Working on a White Background
- 2. Use Your Quick Select Tool Intelligently
- 3. Refine Edge to Finish Off a Selection
- 4. White May Not Necessarily Be White in High Key
- 5. Reuse Adjustment Layer Masks
- 6. Add Some Detail to Your RAW file
- 7. Add Some Texture to Clothing
- 8. Dodge and Burn on a Grey Layer
- 9. Soften Up Skin with Pore Detail
- 10. Add a Little Bit of Vibrance to Your Colors
- Final Thoughts
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
2. Use Your Quick Select Tool Intelligently
In earlier versions of Photoshop, it was much harder to make selections of a given area. A retoucher would have to use a magic wand, channel blend, a pen tool, or magnetic lassos to get a rough selection and spend time massaging it into place. Photoshop now gives you much more intelligent ways to make these selections.
The Quick Select tool is like Magic Wand on a brush. Select a brush size and paint over a specific area for you to select. Easy enough.
Here’s the great part. If you press down the Option key (or Alt on the PC), it will turn the Quick Select tool into a minus sign, letting you remove portions of the selection. Press the Shift key, and the brush will turn into a plus sign, letting you add to the selection (see Figure 4). As you perform this remove and add, the selection starts learning more and more about what you want to keep and what you want to delete. You’ll see that your add and remove sections start becoming increasingly more exact[md]much better than the magic wand or magnetic lasso could have done. The fact that the Quick Select tool learns from my use makes it the number 1 tool for me to go to for knocking out an area.
)