Hello Element users, welcome to this tutorial on selection using the new selection tools in Adobe Element 5. Yes, I know, Adobe Element 6 is available, but I got Adobe Element 5 with my Bamboo and I'm not about to go to buy 6 as well. And besides, I use Photoshop most of the time.
So here are your selection tools. You got your rectangular and elliptical. And they're keyboard shortcut is M. you’ve got your lassos and they're all L. you got lasso, magnetic, and polygonal. And this is the new ones. Magic selection brush tool and the selection brush tool.
So were going to start off with this one and this very pretty picture of this, I think this is a hibiscus. Yeah it is. What you do to select this is take your tool. It’s always in red, its default color is red, but I change it to yellow so I could do the short flower. Because I want you to see this. And around and around. And Photoshop does the selection for you. There you go.
Now, there's a bit of a problem here. You see, this is missing. Can I move over? Yes I can. Okay, so we just take our normal lasso tool and we just go down here and you can see how easy it is with my walk on tablet. And there we go. Fix. And there's another one that’s a bit of a problem, and that’s right here. And it comes up here and down again. And there's that one done. And there's a third one over here, well, there's one right there. I guess we can fix that just a little bit.
That’s a lot easier than trying to go around. I guess you can also use the magic one to do this. But it’s not nearly as fun. Okay, there we go. There's our selection. And were going to do a control or command J to get it to a new level or new layer. And turn off the background. And there it is. And you can see what a great selection it is.
So for a fairly, I guess you could call it homogenous, that’s how you get rid of it. Or how you select it. Okay.
So the next one, were going to use this fine little monarch butterfly and were going to select the other tool. And here it is, right here. The selection brush tool. There's a couple of different ways to do it. You can do it in mass mode or you can do it in selection mode. Now if I zoom in right here. In selection mode, right here. What you get is this, it’s making a little selection as you go. And you can pick it up and make it a different selection. You don’t get rid of the first one. So with my pen I can be fairly accurate.
Now I prefer to us the masking mode. And this is the masking mode. And what it’s doing here is not what I really want to do. So I'm going to step back and start this over again. Undo it. There. Now with the masking mode I get this red paint like I'm doing in here. And what I'm masking is now going to be selected. So once I'm finish with the butterfly, I have to invert it with the selection. But that’s all very straight forward and simple to do.
So you can see how accurate it is, how easy it is to an edge with this. And as I pick up the pen and move it around, nothing changes. If I go to one of the other tools, you can see what I got selected so far. So this is a really good way of doing it. And it’s fairly accurate and you can take your time. Go away for a while, collect your wits. Come back do it again. If it is driving you crazy, because this is the kind of a thing that drives you nuts. And you can do fairly intricate things with it as well. You can see there's a little let there. And there's a little area there I don’t want selected. So there we come down here. You can't see that can you? And here. Well you couldn’t eve see that one. Well, I'm not doing you much good. There you go. I keep forgetting that I only got 320x240 or something like that. I wanted to do full screen.
Okay, so I’ll going to do this whole butterfly, but it’s going to take like forever to do it. so I'm going to just pause this thing for a minute and while I finish it, then we’ll come back and we’ll work on this fairly intricate parts. So just hang on, go get yourself a drink, I’ll be back in a few minutes.
Hello, I'm back and I got all the stuff done. So now I'm just going to fill in these little antennae. And I got a 1 pixel brush doing this. And were coming down here. Oops, I went off line. And up here. This little butterfly was paying me a visit one day sitting on some of my roses up front. And we get this one. And around here like that. Now its legs are a little bit fatter so I could get working on that. And you can see how easy it is to use a tablet. If you want to do good work with Photoshop and really selections are, you got to match your selections. Or you got to get at least somewhat good at them. If you're going to be doing any Photoshop work or Elements work, because you do them so often. And knowing how to do it and being able to do it well is a good thing. And the best way to do it is with a tablet and a pen. Because you got accuracy.
Now were using a tablet and a pen, you're going to have a learning curve. Because you're going to try and use the thing you like the most. And you got to get over that. Once you get over it, it’s amazing how accurate you can be. Okay, now let's zoom back and see how our little butterfly is looking.
So that’s it, it’s all red now. And if I click on any of the other tool, there you can see that it’s selected, but also the whole thing selected so I have to do the inverse. So I'm just going to invert it. There. The butterfly is selected.
Now let's jump this up to a new layer. Control or command J and turn off the background. And there's our butterfly. I know it’s kind of hanging in space, right. We could rotate it or we could add another layer in between. Let's put a new layer in there. And we could fill it with that color. Blue is here now. There we go. That’s our butterfly.
So that’s how you do this. And it really is pretty good and it’s a nice tool. And we’ll zoom in a bit and bring it down so you can see how. So there are maybe a couple little things off right in here. But overall, it’s a pretty good selection.
So I hope you’ve learned something about using the selection tools in Photoshop. And give them a try.