I know there are a lot people out there who want to be better at Photoshop – heck, I’ve been doing this for almost half of my life and I want to be better! Well, I was really thinking about it and it dawned on me that more often than any other tip, I’m telling people they really should master the pen tool. It is hands down the most advanced and precise selection tool and if you boil Photoshop down to its simplest form, it’s a SELECTIVE photo editing software. So I thought to myself, “Hey self, why not really dive deep into selection tools – how to do them, when to use which one, and why they are so dang important?”
How to get killer selections with Channels and Vivid Light
Ever since wanting to focus on colour in my images I’ve found that often times due to budget or location, that I just quite simply cannot get the colours I’d like right in the camera. This means that I’ll often have to change colours in post and that, of course, in turn requires decent selections! There’s a million ways to do that in Photoshop, but I want to give you a kick start guide right here with a basic setup that I truly believe will change your life in selection if you’re unsure of this process.
Your Next Smart Selection Could Be Powered By A Neural Network
Admit it! object masking sucks. It’s not that it is impossible, even the hardest selections and masks can be created with some work (and some methods require less work that others). But, in general, masking is a hard and tedious work.
Researchers in the The Chinese University of Hong Kong working with Adobe Research are now showing some work that uses Convolutional Neural Networks to successfully mask portraits. The paper bears the boring name “Automatic Portrait Segmentation for Image Stylization” [PDF link], and it shows how selection and masking can significantly improve if the software knows that it’s making a portrait.
Open Letter – How Absolutely Amazing Remask Can Be With These 5 Improvements
I am a big advocate for doing everything retoucher needs to do with a few tools as possible. Masking is one of this things that can be perfectly done on Photoshop. There is a range of tools and ways to approach masking from very basic raw selections to precisely calculated and adjusted masks. So you don’t need anything else except Photoshop for the masking in vast majority of cases.
Unfortunately, Topaz Remask masking technology is very good, super precise and easier to use with complex selections than Photoshop. It’s hard to resist not to use this software.
Using Masks and Channels For Object Extraction
Being a pretty diverse tool, Photoshop suggests many ways to accomplish each task. And each has its pros and cons. One of the more powerful tools in photoshop is masks. It is probably also one of the more complex tools. We are going to tackle making today, and hopefully making them a bit less complex.
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