Help

Hi folks,

I have heard of an easier way to select a certain shape that is better than the Magic Wand in Photoshop. The Magic Wand selects straight lines ok, but with curves it makes everything ugly and jagged.

Can someone enlighten me? It'll save a lot of the time I take erasing edges.

Thanks for the help!

i personally don't think there's an easier way than the magic wand but i get where you're coming from w/ the jaggies. there are plenty of complicated ways to fix this using all sorts of masking, layers, channels blah blah blah. but, we're talking about a teeny little avatar outfit or skin so there's a very quick, simple way to fix this (usually).


after you do whatever it is you're doing with the magic wand, select the item again with the wand. you get the blinking marquee lines. go up to select // select inverse.

now the area outside of your image should be selected.

now go back to select // modify // expand and you'll get a pop up window asking for number of pixels. do it by only 1 pixel.

your marquee should now be overlapping the jagged edge of your item.

go up to filters // blur // guassian blur. you'll get the guassian blur window up asking your for radius in pixels. just 1 pixel again.

voila! jaggies be gone.

granted there are a zillion ways to do this but in my experience when working with something small scale and generally simple like avatars this is quick, easy and effective.

i said usually at the beginning because i've seen your work and something tells me you're up to something more complicated than what i'm seeing in my head.

here's a link to site that will show you what i believe to be the annoying complicated way just in case i'm right that you're up to something fantastic lol.
http://darkxero.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=29

are you talking about needing to do this fast? Does the shape consistent?

one technique is to use the pen tool to create a path, which you can save, and convert that path into a selection.

this on its own isn't one-click fast technique, but saving and re-using the path for future images might do the trick.

but like the last poster I bet you know this already, so maybe I'm not getting what you're after

The magic wand is perhaps one of the most attractive but least useful selection tools in Photoshop and edges are where it works most poorly.

It all depends wildly on what you are trying to select, but there are at least a dozen different ways to get a selection, I'll list a few and what some places where I find them useful.

1. marquee tool (M) - useful for selecting rectangular of oval areas, which if you are trying to use the magic wand are almost certainly not what you want
   
2. The Magnetic Lasso (shift-L) - good for selecting areas that have relatively high contrast with their surroundings. This often works well in selecting a figure from a background, particularly in images like SL snapshots as there is a very distinct contrast between figure and ground (hair can be a toughy)
   
3. Select->Color range... can be useful for say grabbing a blue sky when there is little else blue in the image. Playing with the fuzziness slider or adding color variants (shift-click) can help, edges are often missed by this, though.
   
4. Painting a Quick Mask (Q) - allows someone with a tablet to make a very rapid selection with brush work, toggling out of quick mask (Q again) turns the quick mask into the "marching ants" selection.
   
5. Pen tool (P) this is certainly the most accurate and the most time consuming as it allows your eye to trace the area and your eye is still smarter at image interpretation than most of the more automatic tools. If you have time to burn and want to zoom in enough, you can make a pixel perfect selection. Strictly speaking the pen tool doesn't make selections but paths - however paths can be converted to selections from the Paths pallete.
   

There are other things that you can do like using all the tools listed above on a single Channel (e.g. R, G, or B) when there is high contrast in only one of the channels or using shades of grey in the Quick mask mode for making non-binary selections. You can also copy a layer of interest, blow out the contrast (Ctrl-Shift-L) use one of the magic-ish tools above on the high contrast copy, throw out the copy and still keep the selection.

Selections are one of the most important and complicated things in Photoshop and most books good books devote chapters to the subject. Here are a few web tutorials that expand upon the little I wrote above.
http://www.arraich.com/ps6_tips_sselect1.htm
http://www.graphic-design.com/Photoshop/tutorials/0301-27.html

But I strongly recommend that you buy or borrow a book or two on the subject as there is a lot to know about selections. Some that I have found useful are Handy's Photoshop Artistry and various of Kelby's books. But just about any book is better than no book. You also don't need to get too version specific with the books as the art of pshop selection hasn't changed that much, so even if you are using pshop 9 (aka CS2) a pshop 6 book will still be almost the same as any other when it comes to selections.

For what it's worth I've been actively working with pshop for 5+ years and I'm still learning how to make selections more easily and accurately. Good luck.

All great pointers, guys!
I use the magic wand alot, and my technique is to play with the 'tolerance' until I get the right amount of feathering on the edges of my selection.
I usually start with a low value, say 2, then work up until I have a good enough selection.
Often I'll let it go slightly too much, and then clean up the odd crappy edge with the eraser in brush mode once I've made a new layer from the selection.

HTH

I use quick mask almost exclusively for selections...and I don't use a tablet. Select loosely with the lasso then click on the quick mask button (at the bottom of your tools pallet). Now you can move in as close as you want and paint in the rest of your selection to tighten it up. It makes for a more precise selection for me.

Extensis Mask-Pro (a $200 plugin for PS) works on the same principle as the color range option in PS, but takes into account many, many more factors and basically does the masking job better than anything out there because that is what this application is designed for. Thier add campaign, last I checked, showed how a soap bubble floating in front of someones face could be almost perfectly isolated and duplicated throughout the image. Try doing that with PS!

If PS tools are your only option then I suggest using "Select Color Range". When <shift> is held down you can continue to add to the color range. You can then use the Lasso tool to add and subtract from that selection, then save it to an alpha and look for problems. If the area that needs isolation is any more complex than what this option is capable of handling, don't bother with PS options. They only get more byzantine and time consuming the more you try to make them do what you want them to do. I could write a novel on some of the things I've tried. It's better to seek simpler options like Mask-Pro.

I used to use quick mask - I now use layer masks.
As you paint the mask, instead of seeing a red overlay - you actually see the layers below which helps on those ambiguous cuts.

Lasso, lasso, lasso. Learn it, live it, love it.

Nice bit of alliteration, huh?

Anyway, if you hold down the option key while clicking with the lasso tool (at least this is how ya do it on a Mac) it will allow you to draw a very precise selection line. And you can set the edge fuzziness of the lasso too- it's called Feather. A few times a year I get a bunch of freelance work cutting out products from grocery stores. This is much faster & easier than Extensis Mask Pro (I hate that product).

The steps I use are:

1. Set the background paint color to something bright. I like a nice cyan. It just shows you what you've done already.
2. Do a Select All to the whole picture.
3. Cut the whole area, then paste. That will put your picture on a seperate layer and when you start deleting out the parts you don't want, the cyan will show through.
4. Get that lasso tool, set the Feather to 1px, maybe 2 for extra-fuzzy edges.
5. Option-click around what you want to cut out. I select small pieces of the background and delete them out (just hit the delete key while they are selected).
6. Rinse & repeat step 5 until you're done.

There are more steps afterwards like changing that cyan layer to something that would match the edges of your top layer so you won't get that white fuzzy line we all hate. But ya'll can figure that out.

There are so many right ways to do this, but this is my favorite. Hope it helps!

Wow, thanks for the great tips everyone!

I tried the stuff I could try, but in the long run it looks like Janie's way will be easiest for what I do: I draw an outline (using the Brush tool at 1px) of the shirt/skirt/pants/whatever, then fill the layer below the outline with my chosen color. Then I select the outside of the outline, go back to the layer with the color fill, and delete so that I have a colored shape more or less identical to the the shape of the outline. Using the Gaussian Blur gets rid of any stray (visible) jagged edges.

As you can see, the technique doesn't create an exact copy of the original image, but it's near perfect when you draw an outline:

Now that I see the image in question, you can get perfect results without even touching the toolbox in PS.

1. Analyze the RGB values of the white and orange space using the "Info" window (it turns out the white is pure and uniform, and the orange is uniform and has the values shown in the "shape-RGB.gif" image below)

2. Use 2 new adjustment layers (Hue & Sat, Levels) to create a perfect black and white image. Note that the level adjust in the attached PSD file eliminates all of the least significant bits (there is no information loss).

3. Create a new alpha channel from this image (simply "Copy Merged and "Paste" on a new alpha channel)

That's it.

Everyone can see the details for themselves by looking at the layered PSD file I have posted here.