HSCC Meeting Tutorials: More PhotoShop Ideas August 27 2014

Let's start by a review of Photoshop's workspace to get more familiarized with the lay of the land. The Toolbox contains all of the tools for making your pictures better. The colour coded sections help to remember where to look for the right tool.

The Magic Wand (in the blue section above) is a different kind of Selection tool. So far, we’ve looked at tools that select pixels by dragging a square or circle around them. The Magic Wand selects pixels somewhat differently; it selects them based on color values. This enables you to cut foreground objects, such as a lighthouse, out of the background. You might need to combine several selections by holding the Shift key and when you see a little + appear next to the magic wand click the left mouse. If you select too much just use CTRL Z to undo the last selection. You can also adjust the Tolerance in the top menu bar to a less sensitive number.

Here's an example: The sky is a little grey and doesn't really capture the mood of the day, so let's fix that. Select the Magic Wand tool and click on the sky.

You can see that most of the sky has been selected. To select more you can hold down the SHIFT key and click in the unselected sky. That may select too much, like the sea as well, don't panic, just use CTRL+Z to UNDO the last change. We may need to change the tolerance.

Previously the tolerance had been set at 50, so by setting it lower to say, 30, the selection will be less sensitive. By using the SHIFT key again on the unselected sky the whole sky is now selected.

Now that we have the sky selected, be careful not to click anywhere on the picture again otherwise the current selection will be undone. We can now colour the sky. Choose the Image menu, then Adjustments and Color Balance.