(Music playing)
Now I am here in Photoshop on a Windows machine. So I am going to use the shortcut that I mentioned in the last lesson on opening a file. I am just going to double click on the background, again if you are on a MAC, or if you do not want to use the shortcut for some reason. You can go to file open or hit control or command O.
So I am just going to double click the background, and I am going to navigate to my desktop, and then the project files, part 1, lesson 3, and I am going to open up selection primer and hit open.
This is a beautiful photo that was actually taken by Alison, one of the Total Training employees over in the Bahamas. So to start out our lesson on selecting, we are going to zoom into this image very closely, now as I use my keyboard shortcut that I mentioned in the last segment where we have command and spacebar, and then clicking. Zoom in anywhere on the image where there is a lot of detail which in this image it is not very hard. So keep zooming, and even though this is a really beautiful photo, it is a pretty high quality photo, as we zoom in close enough, we will see all these little squares.
These little squares are called pixels spelled p-i-x-e-l. Now pixel is short for picture element, so these little squares are literally the building blocks of your photos inside of Photoshop. And so when we are dealing with Photoshop, primarily we are dealing with the alteration of these little squares. So of the utmost importance in this process is telling Photoshop which pixels, which little squares that it could fiddle with and which ones that it needs to leave alone, and we do that by a process called selecting.
Selecting is perhaps one of the most important concepts in Photoshop, depending on what your workflow is. Selecting is what truly separates the proverbial men from the boys when you are dealing with professional image alteration. Let us see how this works a little bit. I am going to zoom back out again by hitting control, spacebar, and alt.
That is good, now we are going to be talking about filters, but much later on in the training series. Just by way of demonstration, I am going to put a filter on this image. I am going to go to the filter menu at the top. Select blur, and select gauzy and blur. And as we drag the slider over to the right, it will increase the amount of blur applied to our image, and as long as this previewed checked box is checked, we will see the results of this blur here in the image window.
So I am going to bump this up, and you can see that it universally blurs every pixel in the document. So I am going to hit cancel on this, and notice again that that was with nothing selected. However, if we use one of the selection tools, I am going to go to this one, second one down. Hold down my left mouse button, and select Rectangular Marquee tool, and let go.
We will be talking extensively about using the Marquee tools to Mace selections in the next topic, but for right now I want just grab this pertaining to the Marquee tool and Mace a very easy selection by clicking, holding the mouse down, and dragging down into the right to Mace a selection area. These little marching ants indicate that this area, this little box here is selected. Now watch what happens when I go up to filter, blur, gauzy and blur, and apply this blur effect.
First of all, let me zoom out in this window by hitting this negative sign here, the minus sign. And now as we blur this more you will see that only what is within this selection boarder gets edited, it gets blurred. Everything else is protected. So again, only what we have selected is what Photoshop has permission to adjust. As something is not selected, it does not have permission to adjust those pixels. So selecting is tantamount to working effectively in Photoshop.
So let us now get into some of these tools and figure out how they work. I am going to hit cancel on this dialog box, and I am going to hit control d, or command d on the MAC to deselect. Again it is a keyboard shortcut that we are going to be back to over and over again, and you can go to the select menu if you cannot remember that shortcut, and it is right here under deselect. So let us go and talk about some of these Marquee tools that I have briefly mentioned moments ago.
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