Masking a person in one easy step with Photoshop Select Subject

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Course info

17 lessons / 1 hours

Overview

If you’ve ever struggled to maintain a consistent look and feel across all the touchpoints of your content marketing, this lab is for you. Beautiful design is only half the battle when you’re designing for an integrated campaign in which you have to deliver, repurpose, and repeat design elements consistently and efficiently. In this fun, fast-paced, hands-on lab with Adobe Certified Instructor Daniel Scott, learn how to professionally use Photoshop to repurpose your designs across multiple media and formats.

While becoming a design implementation wizard, you’ll learn:

  • How to structure content for multisize social imagery
  • The best workflows for social, print, ad banners, and video
  • The top tools for non-destructive design
  • How to master layers, artboards, Smart Objects, and libraries
  • How to become the master of productivity in your office

Course duration 1.5 hours
Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

Hello creative person. This video is all about select subject  and basically what it does is Ready City,  just like magically cuts people out. If you're like me and you have to do a bit of this kind  of masking, doesn't have to be people, it can be objects,  but bam, it's a one click. It does 95% of the work  and it's pretty easy to touch up afterwards as well. For the bits that don't quite work,  like see his armpit there in the bed, we'll fix that up. Easy peasy.

Let's jump in, get started  and change your life forever if you do lots of masking. Alright, first up, let's go to file. Let's go to open. So we're in Photoshop, file open, find your exercise files,  and then here we're gonna open up hipster one. Click open. Now this is a new S feature.

It got snuck into a midyear release for Photoshop  and nobody knew it was in there. You've all probably missed it,  but it could be the best tool in Photoshop,  especially if you're a person that  needs to clear cut things. Doesn't have to be a person,  but a person is probably one of the hardest. And all we need to do is go to select  and let's go to subject should be called  Super awesome subject thing. But let it do its work  and hopefully we'll have  a selection right around the outside. It's not perfect but it's pretty amazing.

Now to make the mask, all we need to do is down the bottom  of our layers panel here, hit this one here. It says Add layer mask or add a mask. Okay, it's this little third icon in  square with a circle in it. Cool, huh? Now it's done a pretty good job around the place,  but we'll leave this one as is. We'll get into a bit more detail with the next option.

So let's go file save, leave it as the defaults. Click save, click. Okay, and let's go file close. Just to keep things tidy, let's go  and open our second version. So go to file open  and hipster two jpeg,  this handsome man here we gonna do the exact same thing. So go to select super mo, amazing subject thing  and we get a selection.

Awesome. So a few little bits,  but we're gonna flesh that out in the next couple of videos  where we look at smart objects. But for the moment all we're gonna do  is click on this one here. Okay, add a mask Magic. If you're a channel masker from way back  that sometimes you still need a channel mask, but,  but man, this gives you really close  to a really good selection. It's always like 90% there, even like 95%.

I'm making up percentages here, but you get what I mean. Nice. Quick, easy. Now we've done it for a person. It could be just say if you're a product photographer,  it would be amazing 'cause products are don't have hair,  often they don't move. So uh, if you're doing stock kind of uh,  e-commerce photography, man, it's super handy.

If you can get the background with any sort of contrast  or outta focus, bam mask. Done. Alright, let's jump into the next video. We're going to continue on with this a little bit  to fix the hair, but we need  to really introduce a topic called Smart Objects. So let's do it in the next video. I will see you there.
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