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The Quick Selection Tool is one of those tools in Adobe Photoshop that you’ll use over and over and over again. As a matter of fact, selecting aspects of photographs and graphics may be one of the most common tasks that are undertaken with this application. I already discussed using this particular tool in a previous post, so if you’d like to refer back to catch up a bit, please do so.

In this post, I’m going to tackle a small project. I’d like to isolate the background of the above photo and change it to white. Basically, I want the figure in the photo to stand out alone. To accomplish this, I’m going to take a few approaches. The first will be rather intuitive and simple and the second will be more involved, but may open your eyes to a few tricks that may be helpful to you in the future.

Selecting with Quick Select

I’m going to cruise through this section because I already explained how to go about using the Quick Selection Tool in my earlier post.

First, I’ll select the figure in the photo. In the screenshot below, you should see the marching ants around the figure.

Refine the Selection Edges

Now that the figure in the photo is properly selected, I can go ahead and refine the jagged edges. By the way, to select this object, I made frequent use of zooming in (Ctrl+) and zooming out (Ctrl-). I also used the Add to Selection and Subtract from Selection buttons up in the option bar.

Now, I’ll head up to the Select > Refine Edge menu item and click.

From there, I’ll make my edge refinement adjustments.

Once finished, I’ll click Okay and Photoshop will return me to the photograph.

First Method

This method won’t take very long at all, so I won’t spend a lot of time on it. Once the object in the photo is selected, I can simply copy/paste it to a new layer by clicking Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V on my keyboard. That will automatically paste whatever is selected into a layer Photoshop creates. After that, I can simply create a new layer and move it below my pasted selection layer and just use the paint bucket to fill that empty layer in. I can dump any color I want in there. That’s it. Done.

Inverting the Selection

In this step, I’m going to take the opposite approach than the one I just took above. Instead of keeping the object selected, I’m going to invert the selection, so everything but the object is selected. I could have selected the background to begin with, but I went with the smaller object, since I figured it would be faster.

To invert a selection, I’m going to head up to the Select > Inverse menu item and click. This will reverse my current selection.

In the screenshot below, you should see the marching ants around the object and the outer border.

Create New Layer & Fill It

Now that the area I want to fill with white is selected, I can go ahead and create a new layer.

With the new layer active in the Layers panel, I can go over the vertical toolbar on the left and select the Paint Bucket Tool. Once that’s chosen and active, I can change the color to be sure that white get poured into the layer. Finally, I can pour the color into the selected area of the layer. This is what I’ll get. By the way, the area is still selected, as indicated by the marching ants.

Deselecting & Analyzing New Layer

The time has come to deselect my selected area. To do this, I’ll head up to the Select > Deselect menu item and click. This will remove all the marching ants.

For the last part of this post, I want you to take a look at what I’ve accomplished. Like many other tasks in Photoshop, this new layer can have multiple uses. That’s where the designer’s creativity comes into play. If you take a look at the screenshot below, you’ll see that I shifted the new layer over to the right and up a bit. I merely wanted to clarify what the new layer (that I filled with the paint bucket) looks like. When kept in its original position, it looks like a white background.

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Oftentimes, designers use Adobe Photoshop to create mockups to show clients what things may look like if a change were to be made to something. This is actually very common and I think it’s important to understand just how you can use the tools that Photoshop offers to quickly and easily accomplish such a task.

In today’s example, I’m going to pretend that someone has asked me to show them what a particular wall would look like with a specific design applied to it. Of course, these are only demonstration images, but by the end of this post, I think you’ll find that you’ll be able to take what I’ve shown you and apply it across any number of projects. All you’ll need to complete this project is a few images and about five minutes of time. I practiced going through the steps once and it took about ten minutes. The second go round, it was under two. That’s how little time it can take to learn something like this.

Now, I want to stress the versatility of the tool I’m going to introduce today. Back in a previous life (2002-2007), I used to work for a cluster of radio stations in lower New York and did a lot of design work. I frequently created graphics for billboards, vehicles and large buses. If you’ve ever heard of a car wrap or a bus back, that’s what I’m talking about. Back when I did these types of projects, I’m not sure Photoshop even had this tool, so I was forced to use templates that various print shops and ad agencies sent over to me. I now think about how much easier my life would have been if I had been exposed to Vanishing Point.

Starting Images

I’ll be using two images for this post. The first is the actual wall. I’m going to say that a friend or client sent me the image and it’s this surface they’re interested in adding the artwork to.

The second image is the artwork itself. This is what the client would like to overlay on the wall.

Vanishing Point

In art and design, there’s an idea called Vanishing Point. It’s a rather simple concept to understand. I’ll try to explain the area of the concept we’ll be using in this post.

In many drawings and photographs, there are lines that lead to a point in the piece of work that, if followed, will disappear or vanish. Think about standing on train tracks and looking straight down the rails as far as you could see. The point you can’t see anymore is the vanishing point. Say you’re looking down a long river or a straight highway, the same idea applies. The point at which the object disappears is called the vanishing point.

To learn more, check out this resource:

Vanishing Point on Wikipedia

If you look at the photo of the wall above and follow the lines of the large window from right to left, you’ll eventually end up at a spot that intersects. That’s the vanishing point. Vanishing points aren’t always easy to figure out, but oftentimes, they are there. You just need to get used to how to find them.

Open Files Into Photoshop

The very first task I want to take care of is to open the photos I’m going to be using into Photoshop. I’ve already done that. You can see the two tabs, plus the one I’m using for screenshots, below.

Create New Layer

The next step is to create a new layer inside the document I’ll be using as the background. Since the wall image is the background, I’ll create a new layer in this file. The reason for the new layer is to hold the graffiti image I’ll apply later on.

Copy Overlay Image to Clipboard

Now, I’m going to go to the graffiti image and select the entire thing with the Rectangular Marquee tool. To do this, I simply hit Ctrl+A to select all and then Ctrl+C to copy to the clipboard. You can see the marching ants in the screenshot below.

Now, whatever I selected is sitting in the clipboard of my operating system.

Open the Vanishing Point Tool

Now, that my graffiti image is stored in the clipboard, I can click the wall tab to return to that. Next, I’ll head up to the Filter > Vanishing Point menu item and select it.

This will open the Vanishing Point tool, which is in a new window inside of Photoshop.

Now, I want to give you a quick breakdown of what exactly the Vanishing Point tool is. In the most basic sense, it’s a tool that allows you to draw a shape over an image. Once the shape is drawn, you can paste another image into it. The image you paste into it will take the form of the shape you drew. Really, that’s it. If you tried hard enough, you could probably accomplish the same task by using some sort of distort transform tool, but trust me, this method is much easier. In the sections below, I’ll clarify how to draw the shape and apply the image.

Creating a Plane

After I open the Vanishing Point tool, I’ll have the opportunity to create a plane, or in more simple terms, draw my shape. The goal here is to follow the lines that will lead to the vanishing point. In the case of the window image, these lines can be found on the wall and around the window. I’ll show you in the following screenshots.

The tool I’ll use is called Create a Plane. If you look at the screenshot above, you can see it in the left vertical toolbar. It’s the second tool down (currently selected) and has a grid icon inside of the button. Photoshop defaults to this selection when you launch the Vanishing Point tool.

Basically, the way to draw the shape is to click once on one corner of it. Then, when you let go of your mouse pointer, you’ll see that a string is following it. Head to the next corner in clockwise fashion and click it. Then, continuing to follow the plane, click the next corner and finally the last one. What you should see is an outline of the shape with a grid running through it. To better accomplish this, you can use the Ctrl+ and Ctrl- to enlarge and shrink the view. Take a look at my plane.

I know that’s not that easy to see. Let me give you a closer view. It’s cut off a bit, but I can explain better from this one.

Do you see how the grid follows the vanishing point? It’s larger on the right and shrinks down towards the left. It the grid continued, it would eventually vanish. Also, take notice of the lines on the wall I followed to create this grid. As I said above, I use the lines on the wall and the ones around the window. The window is the biggest giveaway here. That made this easy.

Now that the grid is made, I can hit Ctrl+V on my keyboard to paste the graffiti image into the Vanishing Point tool window. Remember – the graffiti image is still sitting in the clipboard.

After I paste the image into the tool, it’ll sit in the upper left corner, just like in the screenshot above. To move the image into the grid area, so it takes the shape of it, I’ll need to click the Transform Tool, which is the 6th one down in the vertical toolbar in the Vanishing Point tool window. If you aren’t sure which one it is, you can hover over each button with your mouse and after a few seconds, a small popup with a description of the tool will appear.

I’ll go ahead and move the image into the grid area. Watch what happens.

It snapped to the shape of the grid. From here, all I need to do is drag the pasted image around a bit so it sits the way I’d like it to and then I can hit the Okay button in the upper right corner. This will close the Vanishing Point tool window and return me to the regular tabs in Photoshop.

Trimming the Window Area

Take a look at the image as it currently stands.

We’ve got two problems. The first is that our graffiti covers the window. Second, we can’t see and of the wall texture through the graffiti. We can fix both of these issues.

In order to clip away the part of the graffiti image that’s covering the window, I’ll need to hide the graffiti layer by clicking the little eye icon in the layer itself (making sure the layer stays selected).

Next, I’ll use the Polygonal Lasso tool to draw a shape around where I want to remove the image.

This works much like the previous shape tool did. Click one corner, let go of the mouse pointer and continue clicking the corners until you make it back to the very first point you clicked. When you see a small circle appear at the tip of your mouse pointer, you can click once more to close the loop. This will select the area and create the marching ants.

To remove the selected area, I simply hit Delete on my keyboard and I’ll end up with the screenshot above. To remove the marching ants, or deselect the area, I’ll click inside of it once.

Applying a Blend Mode

To give the overlay sort of a transparent look that will show the texture of the wall, I can use a blend mode. I went through a few of them and found that Multiply worked best. It allowed the shadow to come through and the texture to appear lifelike.

That’s it. The project is finished and I can hand the image to my client. This will give a good idea of what some artwork would look like on his wall.

Now, I know you have questions. This was a lot of information and something is bound to be unclear. Please use the comment form below and I’d be happy to help in any way I can.

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There may come times when you need to align duplicate layers in Adobe Photoshop. I can’t tell you when those times may occur, but they will. And when they do, you’ll wish you had a method for accurately aligning those layers. That’s what I’m here for.

In this post, I’m going to let you in on a really neat tip that will help you greatly in aligning layers. I’ll be using example photos in this post, but rest assured that you can use anything – photos or graphics. The technique works with either. And the best part, it’s super simple. A word of warning though, this will be sort of a long and cumbersome post. Please follow it though because I think you’ll get something from it.

Example Photos

A while back, I talked about blend modes in Photoshop. I actually wrote some posts that covered various aspects of them. If you’d like, you can take a look at those posts here:

What are Blending Modes in Adobe Photoshop?

Learning the Difference Between Blending Modes in Adobe Photoshop

Now, I’ll be the first to say that there are a zillion ways to go about using blend modes. In the previous posts though, I discussed duplicating a layer and applying a blend mode to the top one. By doing this, you can oftentimes achieve the look you’re after. The thing is, sometimes you accidentally move the top layer so it’s no longer aligned with the original. Or perhaps you resize it, so it’s not matching up the way it should. Or maybe you simply cropped just one section of the top layer out and you’d like to get it positioned where it’s supposed to be. Again, there are probably another zillion reasons why you’d need to square layers up. The challenge is getting them so they’re perfectly aligned. It’s tough under certain circumstances, such as when the layers are different sizes or shapes.

I’ll be using three example photos to get my point across, here they are. These are the originals.

The “Difference” Blend Mode

Let’s take a look at what Adobe says about the Difference blend mode.

Difference – Looks at the color information in each channel and subtracts either the blend color from the base color or the base color from the blend color, depending on which has the greater brightness value. Blending with white inverts the base color values; blending with black produces no change.

Do you know what this means? Me neither. Let’s take a look at what happens when I create a new layer, fill that layer with pure white and then apply the Difference blend mode to it. I’ll use the first example photo here.

Now, I’ll fill the top layer with gray.

Now, I’ll fill the top layer with pure black.

Okay, so what we get from this quick experiment is that Adobe’s description is right-on. When we used the Difference blend mode on the white top layer, it inverted the colors of the bottom layer. When we use gray in the top layer and use the same blend mode, it only inverts the bottom layer half way. When we use black in the top layer, the bottom layer isn’t inverted at all. Interesting.

Now, let’s see what happens when I fill the top layer with white again and shift it over to the left and up a bit.

As you can see, the area of the top layer looks just like it should. We went over this a few example photos above. It’s now just moved over some.

To continue on with my demonstration, I’m going to get rid of the solidly colored top layer and simply duplicate the photo layer. I’ll then apply the Difference blend mode to the top layer and shift it to the left and up, just like I did above.

Okay, nothing too exciting here. What I’m seeing is the bottom layer and the top layer now. Both have the same content, but the overlapping area has some funky coloring.

Now I’ll move the top layer a bit closer to the source layer.

Still nothing too exciting. Sort of the same thing as above. Just difference positioning. Let me perfectly align the top and bottom layers to see what happens.

Oh wait, that’s pretty weird. I think we’re onto something. This may be helpful. Let me explain. When identical layers are perfectly aligned with one another and the Difference blend mode is applied to the top layer, the entire image will turn black. If you don’t yet see how this is helpful, let me move the top layer over to the left by just one pixel.

Do you see it now? Basically, if both layers are duplicates and identically sized, all you need to do to accurately align them is to apply the Difference blend mode to the top layer and move it around until you get solid black. How cool is that? The same is true for resizing. If you have the same conditions, but the layers are of different sizes, you can resize until you get black. I’m not saying this is easy, but it works.

For my next example, I’ll cut a perfect square from the bottom photo layer and paste it into its own layer. Then, I’ll apply the Difference blend mode to the top layer.

Now, I’ll shift the top layer (the square) over to the left by just one pixel.

Pretty cool, huh? So, if you have just a portion of the bottom layer, you can still use this method to align the top with the bottom. Maybe you want to do this as an effect or something. You could treat the top layer as a callout. Maybe apply a different blend mode to it. In the photo below, I aligned the layers using my method and applied the Multiply blend mode to the top layer and then duplicated that layer twice more. Just think about if the top layer were circle or another shape. The possibilities are endless.

Finally, I’ll display the image with the two dogs in it to show you that this method of alignment works well with particularly tough to align photos. You know, the ones with tons of detail in them, like shaggy or curly dog hair. You really never quite know when these are aligned. Well, it’s simple now. I’ll merely show you what the photo looks like when I’ve duplicated the bottom layer applied the Difference blend mode to the top. I also moved the top layer over to the left a few pixels. You can see how much I moved it over by looking at the brighter vertical stripe over at the right side of the photo. If I didn’t shift the top layer at all, the entire image would be black, indicating that both layers are aligned.

Again, there may be any number of reasons why you might need to align identical layers in Photoshop and can’t use any traditional methods. What I’ve shown you above is simply another tool in your arsenal.

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One of my most frequent tasks in Adobe Photoshop has to do with selecting objects. Whether it be to separate them from something else or to add some sort of edge or color alteration, I can tell you that I use the selection tools all the time. One tool that’s especially helpful for things like this is the Quick Selection Tool. This tool is sort of like a brush in that you can either add selection or remove it. It’s pretty wild.

In today’s post, I’m going to be demonstrating which tool the Quick Selection Tool is and a bit about how it works. Then, I’m going to make a selection from the photo above and demonstrate how the Refine Edges portion of this tool can really help define the outer border of the selection. I think you’ll enjoy it.

The Quick Selection Tool

If you look over in the left toolbar, fourth tool down, you’ll see the Quick Selection Tool. You may have to click and drag out with your mouse to expose it. It’s coupled with another tool called the Magic Wand Tool.

Once you click on the tool, you’ll see an options bar appear above the workspace.

I want you to take a look at the four options, beginning with the second one in from the left.

The second one is the New Selection option. This is what you use if you have already begun or are finished selecting something and would like to start over. This will clear any selection previously made.

The next option is Add to Selection. I mentioned above that this tool is sort of like a paintbrush. Well, this is what I mean. Let’s say that you already made some selections and can see the marching ants (selected areas) and would like to continue adding to that current selection. Well, you can do that with this option. You can click your mouse button to make a selection, let go of the mouse and then click it again to make further selections. The original selected areas remain and are added to. Sort of like painting a wall. Just because you stopped painting for a while doesn’t mean you can pick up the brush and continue later on.

After that, we have the Subtract from Selection option. This acts as an eraser. If you selected too much (as I’m sure I will in my example below), you can reduce the selected area. You would simply click and drag your mouse pointer around where you don’t want any selection. It’s quite versatile.

Finally, we have a dropdown that controls the aspects of the tool. When you click the dropdown, you can adjust the size of the selection tool, the hardness of it as well as its spacing. Brush spacing is a post for another day, so for now, leave it at its default setting of 25%. Size is fairly straightforward in that as you increase the size, your selection tool grows and, in turn, selects more with fewer movements. Hardness controls the accuracy of the selection tool edge. The harder the edges, the more precise. The softer the edge, the more fuzzy and inaccurate. Just remember, if you’re working on making selections from large, clean edges, you’ll most likely want a larger selection (brush) size and if you’re into the nitty gritty, you’ll want a smaller one. If the edges are defined, such as a white circle on a black background, you’ll want a harder edge and if you’re selecting some pieces of grass from a meadow, you’ll want a softer edges. It’ll take practice to get used to these settings.

Making Selections

I chose this particular photo as an example because the edges are a mess. There’s no way I’ll be able to quickly make any selections and I’ll have to use various brush sizes to get anywhere. It’s perfect. Currently, the image is a bit over 5000px wide, so it’ll allow me to zoom in to show you some of the details of what I do.

Okay, I’m going to attempt to select the entire pineapple and its related splashing water and isolate it from the black background. Normally, this would take some time to do a nice job. Since this is only a demonstration, I’m going to work quicker to give you a general sense of what I’d like to do.

To select the majority of the area I’m after, I’m going to increase my brush size to 510px and then click and drag the tool around the inside edge of the area I want to select. As I move, I notice that the tool acts sort of like a magnet, clinging to the edges it can decipher. I’ll zoom in so you can see what happened.

If you look closely at the above screenshot, you’ll see the marching ants. They’re not exactly tracing the outer edge of my desired area, but what I have is a good start. The next step is to reduce my brush size so I can sneak into some more detailed areas. I’ll bring it down to 70px.

Now, if you’ll look closely, you can see that all the gaps are filled in with the marching ants. The edge (in this particular area) is fairly well defined. If I wanted to select each of those little bubbles, I can do that. All I’d need to do is reduce the brush size even further and to zoom into the photo so I had more room to work with. I’m not going to do that today.

Refining the Edges

In general, when making selections, the edges of the selected area end up rather ugly. They either aren’t as sharp as you’d like or as soft as you’d like. Something is usually wrong with them. Luckily, there’s a tool within Photoshop that will allow us to analyze the edges and make any changes to them that we see fit.

With the area I want selected and the tool still chosen, I’ll head up to the Refine Edge button and press it.

The moment I do this, a dialog box appears.

As you can see, there are a few options inside this box. The first one you’re going to want to set is the View Mode. Since I’m selecting something that’s on a black background, I want to change the not selected area to something opposite of black. This will give me the clearest picture of what my edge looks like. So, I’ll click the View Mode drop-down and choose On White.

As you can see, by making this selection, my selected area stayed put and everything else was made white. Now, I can really get a good look at the edges. And just as I suspected, the edges are muddled and soft. They’re jagged and aren’t smooth lines as I’d like them to be. I’ll need to make some adjustment.

I’m going to leave the Radius alone. It’s currently set to 0, which is good because I don’t want to add area to my edge. Actually, I want to do the opposite. Next, I’ll increase the Smooth setting to 50. This will reduce the jaggedness I just referred to above. After that, I’ll leave the Feather setting at 0 because, again, I don’t want to increase the softness of the edge, I want to harden it. I’ll increase the Contrast setting to 50% because I want more definition between the selected area and the background and finally, I’ll slide the Shift Edge setting to the left at 50% to actually remove some of the outer material of the selected area. This will really sharpen the edge. Here is the result.

If you look closely at the previous two screenshots, you’ll see a slight difference in the quality of the edges.

Now, the challenging part of a project like this is to apply everything I just discussed to the entire photograph. Before refining any edges, I’d need to be sure my selection was finished. Then, I could go ahead with cleaning up the outer border.

What to do Next?

I wrote a post that talked about what to do with selections a while ago. If you want, you can read it here:

Making Selections in Adobe Photoshop

Most of the time, after selecting an object, I’d copy and paste it to a new layer. to do that quickly, I simply push Ctrl+C and then Ctrl+V on my keyboard. This copies the selection and then creates a new layer and pastes it automatically.

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Today, I’m going to work on a simple example project. I’m going to use the photo seen above as a background for some suggestive vacation text. I’ll also give the photo a border. There will be five layers in all. Then, I’m going to convert all three layers into one smart object (remember the importance of smart objects?) and reduce it in size so it fits some imaginary specification.

The reason I want to turns these layers into a smart object is simple. I know myself and from past experience, I recognize that I may change my mind, regarding the layout or design, later on. If I resize the layers without turning them into a smart object, I can’t go back and expand them to their original size again. The previous action would have destroyed the quality of the layers.

So, in this post, I’ll demonstrate how to convert multiple layers into a Smart Object, how to use the Free Transform tool to reduce the dimensions of the graphic how to edit the contents of the smart object if a change is necessary.

Original Graphic

I created an example graphic for this post, as I mentioned above. There are a total of five layers.

The bottom layer is the photograph, the three center layers are text and the top layer is the outline. This is very simple, yet realistic.

Transferring Graphic to Page Layout

Let’s pretend that I’m going to use this graphic on a page of a magazine. Now, I want to impress upon you that this is an example demonstration. The graphic and the sample page’s resolution are both at 72 dpi, when they would actually need to be at least 300 dpi for print. Also, I’m sure the layout isn’t perfect somewhere as well.

To transfer this graphic to the page layout file, I’m going to highlight the layers I’d like to see over there and drag them to the page layout tab.

Once I drag the graphic layers to the other tab, that other document should appear. After it appears, I can continue dragging the layers down into position.

You can see the translucent layers in the screenshot above. Once I let go, the graphic appears.

Now, it’s obvious that the graphic is too large for this page. I’ll need to reduce the size.

I covered the above process in more depth down in the comment section.

Creating a Smart Object From Multiple Layers

Before I do anything else, I want to convert the graphic layers to a smart object. I don’t want anything pushed around. To do this, I highlight the same layers I just dragged over and head up to the Objects > Convert to Smart Object menu item and select it.

Right after I do that, the highlighted layers will collapse into one. Now, I’ll be able to use the Free Transform tool to adjust the size of the smart object to fit in the guides I just created. I’ll go to Edit > Free Transform and do my editing.

That’s looking pretty good. If, for some reason, I wanted to increase the size of the graphic, I could do so without losing quality. Smart objects are good like that.

Editing the Contents of a Multiple Layer Smart Object

Oh no! I typed the wrong phone number in the graphic. Also, after looking at the graphic, I’d like to see the top text much larger and have it run across the page more. I’ll need to do some editing.

To edit the contents of a smart object, I’ll head up to the Layer > Smart Objects > Edit Content menu item and select it.

The moment I select that menu item, a new tab will appear in Photoshop that will contain only the layers of the smart object. What will appear is the unedited (resized) version of the layers I had originally turned into the smart object.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the image is larger than the guides I had resized it to in the page layout. The thing is, in this new editable tab, all the layers are once again separate. I can do anything I want to them, just as if no smart object had even been created. I’ll click on the appropriate layers and make my edits.

There we go. Now the phone number is correct and the leading text is much larger.

Applying the Edits

Just because I made some changes in the new “edit” tab doesn’t mean that those changes were applied to the page layout document that I want them to appear in. In order to apply the changes, I’ll need to save the edit document. To do this, I’ll go to the File > Save menu item and select it.

Now, if I look at my page layout document, I’ll see the edits.

How cool is that?

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If you’ve enjoyed today’s post and found it helpful, please share it with a friend. Also, if you’d like to continue learning and would like our posts sent directly to your email inbox, simply sign up for our newsletter. We’ll send each and every post directly to you. Thanks!

Have you ever wanted to change the attributes of something other than what you’ve already selected in Adobe Photoshop? What I mean is, let’s say you have a photo like the one above. You use one of the many selection tools that Photoshop has to offer and you select the iris of the eye. The thing is, you’re already happy with the way the iris is portrayed. What you’d like to do is change everything else in the photo. Maybe it’s the hue, saturation or the contrast. If you’ve ever wondered how designers and photo editors do things like this, you’re in luck. Today I’m going to show you how it’s done.

In this post, I’m going to explain how to go about selecting an area of a photograph and then how to invert that selection. By doing this, you’ll have the ability to alter everything but what you initially selected. This is a very handy bit of knowledge to have in your back pocket, so be sure to read the post all the way through. Also, at the end, I’ll give you a quick tip that will help accomplish the same task by using a different method.

Making My Selection

I’m going to stick to using the simple selection tools in this post. I could go for one of the more advanced ones, but since I have yet to talk about them, I don’t want to confuse anyone. Especially since this isn’t a post about selection, per se. Because this is the case, I’ll use the Elliptical Marquee Tool from the left toolbar. With this tool, I want to select the iris. Because the area I’d like to select is round and challenging to accurate encapsulate, I’m going to drag one guide from the ruler that runs along the top of my work area and another that runs along the left side. For the top guide, I’m going to rest the horizontal line right on top of the iris and for the left guide, I’ll line it up with the leftmost edge of the iris. Then, I’ll rest my tool pointer right on top of the intersection of my guides and click and drag down and to the right. This will effectively circle the iris with the Elliptical Marquee Tool. When I feel the iris is selected to my liking, I’ll let go of the mouse. I know this sounds like a lot of steps. It isn’t. Just take a look at the photo below.

I’ve got a tip for you. If you want to select something and make your selection either a perfect square or circle, simply hold down the Shift key on your keyboard as you’re dragging the tool. That will lock those proportions. Also, if you don’t see any rulers in your workspace, head up to the View > Rulers menu and make sure that item is checked off. To create a guide from a ruler, simply click on top of one of the actual rulers and drag your mouse outward towards where you’d like the guide to rest. To adjust the position of a guide, use the Move Tool from the left toolbar and hover over the guide. When the mouse pointer changes to a different icon, you can click and drag anywhere you’d like. To remove a guide, click and drag it right off the screen. Let go of the mouse and it’ll disappear.

Inverting the Selection

Now that I have the area I want to protect selected, I can invert the selection so it encapsulates everything but this initial area. To do this, I’ll head up to the Select > Inverse menu item and click. Take a look at what happens when I do that.

To see what happened, look closely at the above screenshot. At first glance, you might not notice anything. Take a look at the outer edge of the screenshot. Instead of having the iris selected, the selected area reversed itself and now everything but the iris is selected. What good is this? I’ll show you.

Desaturating Selected Area

My goal for this project is to make the iris really stand out from the rest of the photo. To accomplish this, I’ll desaturate the selected area. To do this in a non-destructive manner, like I explained in this post and this post, I’ll head over to the Adjustments panel and click on Hue/Saturation.

From there, I’ll move the Saturation slider all the way to the left. This will remove all color.

See what happened? It’s sort of like those photos where everything is in black and white, except for one item. Usually a rose or something like that. It’s fairly easy to accomplish. Well, if the area to initially select is round or square. If it’s oddly shaped, it’s going to be more of a chore. I’ll get to that in a later post.

Bonus Method

As promised, I’ll give you a bonus method that will accomplish the same task. Now, the only reason I’m giving this method is because this is a simple project. I can get away with it. If I had different or further goals, I might not use this.

Since I want to separate the iris from everything else in the photo, I’ll set up the rulers and select it like I did above.

Once selected, I’ll click Ctrl+C and then Ctrl+V on my keyboard to copy and paste the selection. This will turn the iris into it’s own layer. Here, I’ll move it around a bit just to prove that.

Of course, I clicked on Edit > Undo after I moved the layer because I want it in the correct position, which is where it started.

Now that I have the iris on its own distinct layer, it’s protected from what happens to the original layer beneath it. So, if I click on the bottom layer with the photo in it and then head up to the Adjustments panel and click on Hue/Saturation again, I can follow the same exact instructions as I gave above. I can move the saturation slider all the way to the left to desaturate the entire layer, while leaving the layer above untouched. I’ll get rid of the guides and show you the result.

See? I get the same result. And to be honest, in certain cases, this method is more versatile. But, this post was supposed to be about how to invert a selection, so you can safely ignore this second method.

Questions? Please ask below. I love to answer any and all of them.

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