Color Range in Photoshop

Hello, everybody! Yanik here for your Yanik’s Photo School and today we’re going to be looking at a way of selecting an object using the color range feature in Photoshop. Now we’re used to using the magic wand probably most of the time to select our object or go with a one of the marquee tools. But, we’re going to try a quick way today and you’ll see that it does a pretty good job at it as well.

Now what's important while using the color range feature is that your object is very color contrasted compared to your background if you want to cut it out. So if I had a green apple here on the green background it wouldn’t work as well as if I have this lovely red apple on a green background. Now if you have a black object on a white background, blue object on a yellow background you understand the meaning of this now. So you need a nice contrast between the object that you want to select and your background. In this case, green and red and even some whites and blues in there that’s perfect, so let’s get at it.

What we need to do is go in here and just select color range. It’s that simple. Then what you want to do with your eyedropper is select the background. Now as you can see, there's still some grey in there so we want to hold the shift key down and you’ll see the plus sign appears on the eyedropper and we’re just going to go and select everything until the complete background is white. Now what we want to do is make sure that our apple stays black and that is almost completely black in the books as well. You can play with your fuzziness and all the way down or not. I think this looks good at around 70 or so. And you just click okay and boom! You got your selection done, alright.

Now what we want to do if we want to move the object into another image we wanted to go to select inverse. Before it was selecting the background and now it’s actually selecting the object when you use inverse. Now let’s say I want to put that apple in that book into this beautiful blue sky. Let’s go back to that image, use the move tool and let’s just move it little on the side here. Click on your object and drag it into your sky. And then let’s move it to the side here, and it’s that simple. So when you have nice contrast between your background and your object the color range tool in the select menu color range is a great option for something that’s really quick to do.

If we looked at 100% you can see the detail here is there, there are no jagged edges. The fuzziness at around 70 was perfect. Sometimes, you have to do trial on there and you’ll see okay, selected part of my object, let’s go back and do another selection and maybe with a little less or little more fuzziness and that’s all you need to do is to play with it even in the corners here. It looks really good. The only thing that we have is a little bit of a green tint on the apple that’s due from the reflection of the light from their green background and we could play with that and desaturate our green a little bit.

You can even see the apple stem here, it looks really good. And there you go, it’s a quick and easy tutorial on how to use the color range feature in Photoshop to select an object. I hope you enjoy this tutorial. Yanik Chauvin, signing out, bye, bye.