Contents
An Introduction to the Quick Selection Tool
How to Make Selections with the Quick Selection Tool
How to Refine and Preview Your Selections
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- How the Quick Selection differs from other Photoshop selection tools
- How to make selections with the Quick Selection tool, step by step
- How to use the Refine Edge feature to adjust and improve selections
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An Introduction to the Quick Selection Tool
The traditional way of making selections in Photoshop involved using a tool such as the Magnetic Lasso to trace the perimeter of the area that you intended to select. Then Adobe introduced the Magic Wand tool, which allows you to make selections by clicking on specific areas within an image that you’d like to select—the Magic Wand then makes an educated guess at the selection that you intended to make. Photoshop CS3’s new Quick Selection tool is the next step in Photoshop selections—it makes the entire process of selecting specific parts of an image easier, faster, and more accurate.
How the Quick Selection Tool Works
To make selections with the Quick Selection tool, you simply paint within the area that you’d like to select. To paint, you use the Quick Selection tool’s built-in brush, which works just like Photoshop’s regular Brush tool—you can increase the size (diameter) of the brush to select large areas and decrease its size to select smaller areas.
As you move the brush, the tool finds the edges of the area that you’d like to select and adds them to your selection automatically. If the tool selects an area that you didn’t want to select, you can easily remove that portion from the selection without having to start all over. Once you’ve finishing making your selection, you can fine-tune its edges and preview what your final selection will look like by using the Quick Selection tool’s Refine Edge feature.
The Advantages of the Quick Selection Tool
Though you can still use the Magnetic Lasso and/or the Magic Wand to make selections in Photoshop CS3, you’ll probably want to use the Quick Selection tool instead, since it offers so many advantages over its predecessors:
- Ease: The Quick Selection tool does most of the work of making a selection for you. You don’t need to trace the area manually, as you do with the Magnetic Lasso, or click once and hope that the tool guesses the selection that you’d like to make, as you do with the Magic Wand. Instead, you control exactly which portions of the image to select—you simply paint within the area that you’d like to select, and the Quick Selection tool makes the selection on the fly.
- Speed: Since you can control the size of the brush that you use to make selections, you can select vast parts of an image quickly—often in just one pass of the Quick Selection tool’s brush.
- Accuracy: The Quick Selection tool guesses the areas that you intend to select much more accurately than the Magic Wand tool does. The tool’s accuracy makes the pro-cess of making even complicated selections much more efficient.
- Convenience: With other selection tools, after you’ve made your selection, you need to use other features to fine-tune it. If you then decide to change the selection, you need to step back through your History to redo the selection. The Quick Selection lets you fine-tune your selection from within the tool itself, before finalizing the selection.
- Preview: Photoshop users typically make selections with the intention of using the selected pixels in another image (or layer), as a Quick Mask, or as a Layer Mask. The Quick Selection tool facilitates this process by letting you preview how your selection will appear against various colored backgrounds, as a Quick Mask, or as a Layer Mask before you actually make the selection. For instance, if viewing the current selection against a white background reveals flaws in the selection’s edges, you can adjust the selection, preview it again, and then make it final.
How to Access the Quick Selection Tool
The Quick Selection tool is located in Photoshop’s Tools palette, in the same button that houses the Magic Wand tool.
- Click on the Magic Wand tool’s icon
in the Tools palette and move your cursor to the right. - A submenu will appear to the right in which you can select the Quick Selection tool.
The Quick Selection Toolbar
When you select the Quick Selection tool in the Photoshop Tools palette, the Quick
Selection toolbar will appear just under the main Photoshop toolbar at the top of your screen. The Quick Selection toolbar contains several options and features unique to the Quick Selection tool.
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