Today, I want to show you how to use one of my favorite tools which is the quick selection tool and I’m going to go ahead and click on it. and basically, it's a brush so I am going to hit my right bracket to make the brush larger and I am basically going to remove my subject from the background. So I’m just going to start going over the areas that I want to keep and I’m going to come up here and show you. If you have this auto enhance turned on and it does take a little bit longer but I makes the details a little bit easier to grab and it takes more time to evaluate the image and what needs to be selected. So I do have auto enhance selected and I’m just going to come down here and just kind of go over these areas. I’m going to hit my left bracket and make my brush smaller and come down.

And so as you can see, I’ve roughly selected the areas that I want to keep although it's not exact as I have some black areas behind here that I don’t really want. So I need to go and work on the details now. so I’m going to select my magnifying glass and I’m just going to come over to this area that I want to work on the details back to my quick selection tool.

Now, I’m going to press the Alt key to deselect these areas and I’m just going to go over them. As you could see, I have a little minus symbol in my brush now and I’m going to make my brush a little bit smaller and I’m just going to deselect some of this area right underneath this arm. And then my plus tool, because I lift it up on the Alt key and I’m going to come back in here and I’m just going to look at the details here. I’ve got a little bit of white here around these fingers that I want to take away so I’m going to press my Alt key to get my minus symbol and I’m just going to go over that. And this area, this black right behind here that I want to get rid off, so I’m going to press my Alt key and right here around his arm. I mean at this Alt key and then get rid of that area and I could work on this area inside his helmet and all of these little scores but I’m going to skip that for now because I don’t want to get that detailed on this tutorial.

And right here, I want to go ahead and select a little bit more of his finger and you can zoom in even closer if you want to make sure your exactly you want to be. A little bit more of his thumb and now I’m going to zoom in a little bit more on his head and back to my selection tool and I’m going to make sure I have and I’m going to press Alt and get rid of this area. And I went too far so this is kind of a fine areas that kind of get a little bit more difficult.

You may have to get a smaller brush for and I’m going to go ahead and zoom here in here a little bit more and just make sure I get the areas of his ear that I want. I press my Alt key and short cut and that looks pretty good. I’m going to subtract this little area right here—oops—I had it back in and we can get as detailed as you want. Now I’m going to view the on screen. Okay, now I’m looking at over and to me it looks pretty good.

So now, we’re going to the next step which is refine edge and right now it's showing what it would look like with the black background because I mean a white background because this white is selected. If you saw like the black, you can see what it looks like with the black or a mask or nothing. So, I’m more than likely going to put this on a black background. So I’m going to see how it looks with this and this basically, you just start playing with this and you could see what they do and the smoothing and yu can expand your area that your working so this shows more of the background when I can expand it. And this brings the background end more when I contract this so you kind of want to find your place there.

Feathering just softens the edges as you can see and you might just go extreme so that you can see what it does exactly and I’m just wanting to—I don’t really want to see anything white behind him so I’m taking away a little bit extra just so that I don’t see anything whit. And I just want to make it a little bit soft and them I’m going to click okay and it hasn’t really done anything yet. It's still just showing this outline so I’m going to come up here to my window and I’m going to look at my layers and I’m like—I always like to make a copy of my background layer and then I’m, just going to click on the mask tool. And because this background is on and you can see what it did but it just basically masked of everything. So it's still there but its mask off.

Now, I can take this off. I can take this layer and I can just drug into any photograph that I want any poster or anything that I want to work on. And I can double click it and I can ad like a drop shadow and I can you know increase the shadow or I can add an outer glow so you can see that you have a lot of fun with it once you extract it. And it really doesn’t take very long ao I hope you enjoy the quick selection tool.