(Quick) Selection Tool

mattyboy777 · Moderator

Photoshop CS3 sees the addition of the quick selection tool. Designed to be semi-automated, it's designed to speed up the selecting process, especially good if you're in a hurry!

My question though, is just how good is it? Anybody mastered it yet? One of the things I'd like to see is a kind of sensitivity control, I know that would start to defeat the object of it being a 'quick' selection tool, but sometimes having the option of adding more control to a tool can drastically improve its useability.

Anybody got any thoughts on this?

LurkerPatrol · Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2008 3:50 pm Post subject:

For simple things with 1-color backgrounds, I think the magic wand tool will always reign supreme.

I love using it when the task is simple. When it's slightly less simple, I tend more towards color range but even that isn't 100% accurate.

If nothing else works I just pull out the trusty pen tool and cut it out. True 100% accuracy. Only thing that may cut the accuracy a bit is the person behind the keyboard using the pen tool

I don't really like the quick selection tool, it just seems meaningless. I can fiddle with tolerances and what have you on the magic wand and still end up with the same-ish result.

What do you think?

mattyboy777 · Moderator

Yeah there's certainly a long list of selecting techniques inside PS.

I've got to admit, I'm not really a big fan of the Quick Selection tool myself, I prefer to have control, and the QST just doesn't give you that. In saying that though, it's designed to be quick and painless, one of those tools you can try quickly, and if it doesn't work, move onto the next tool/command.

I love the pen tool too, but it's only really effective when selecting 'sharp' outlines, I've never found it does such a good job when selecting soft or fuzzy areas. Only natural I guess for a tool that creates a path.

I like the magic wand, the colour range command is even more impressive, then there's extract, erase, quick masking..........and of course, one of my fav subjects.....channel masking!

LurkerPatrol · Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 11:29 am Post subject:

Yeah definitely one of my fav techniques (which for some stupid reason I forgot to mention O_o) is the layer mask too.

I love that tool so much. It is the fundamental tool for background removal, extraction, blending, erasing, fading, and quite a few other things.

Great tool.

I've never actually done channel masking. What is that?

mattyboy777 · Moderator

It's when you use a channel to create a mask.

So you may for example, copy the image's blue channel to a seperate alpha channel (thus creating the mask) and then work on improving it using some of the other tools you've mentioned. You can also mix channels (or various regions of channels) using the Apply Image & Calculations commands.

I've heard people refer to channel masking as the art of using the image to select itself.

It's definitely an interesting area of 'Photoshopping'!