How to use the Object Select tool in Photoshop

Questions

Course info

15 lessons / 1 hours

Overview

This course is for designers & marketers who already understand the fundamentals of Photoshop but believe there is a more effective, faster way to work. Work through a multi format creative campaign and learn techniques which will ensure hyper-efficiency & consistency.  

Join Adobe certified instructor Daniel Scott to learn:
 • How to maintain a consistent look across social media, print and web touchpoints.
 • Fast and efficient selection & masking techniques.
 • Practical retouching techniques and time saver shortcuts using Photoshop.
 • Workflow hacks for nondestructive design using artboards, Smart Objects & libraries.
 • The many new Photoshop 2020 features   
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.

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Transcript

Hi everyone. It's time to get our hands dirty using some  productivity tools. We're going to disappear this stick. Ready? Gone. Okay, nice and quick and easy.

And if you're like, Hey Dan,  I've, I know how to use content. Wear fill. Oh, hang around. There's some updates. We're gonna use Object select Tool. It's kind of new and we're gonna use the new updated  features in Content Aware fill too.

So hang around. Even if you think you can do it on your own,  I bet you there'll be some time saving to be had. Alright, let's get started. Okay, to get started, the Object select tool is kind  of grouped in this gang here. Okay? The old magic wand tool.

Ah, I remember you so fondly  quick selection tool is pretty amazing. And this is the a new Option Object Selection tool. Click on that. All we need to do is click hold  and drag a box roughly around the thing we wanna select  and ready. Come on, commuter spinning ball. And now mine works a little slowly  because I've got, uh, the beta version, okay?

There's just a few little things  that get sped up when it's finalized,  but pretty amazing, huh? It's gone through and selected our stick. And now if we wanted to just do a mask,  I'm gonna click down the bottom here  and just add a layer mask. You can see it's done a pretty sweet quick job, right? I'm gonna go to edit undo. Um, but, uh, what I wanna do is remember I wanna remove the  stick completely and it does a better job if  we expand that selection.

So just do a real quick rough selection with the, uh, object  selection tool and then just expand it out by going  to select, go to modify and go to this one that says expand. And this is going to expand our selection by how much, uh,  you'll need to play around  with it depending on your one I've already practiced. Okay? And it's 60 pixels and we click okay,  and it just kind of like jumps out of it. Now to remove it, we're going  to use edit content Aware fill, okay? The content of where fill option is kind of not that new.

It's uh, one version old,  but it's actually been updated in  here to do some nice stuff. So if you've used it before  and you found that a little bit hard, what it does is, hey,  first of all, holy moly, I missed that bit. Like it just disappeared. Hey, okay. It's pretty magic. Now if yours doesn't do the magic, okay,  you're using your own example.

Something else over here, this is pretty interesting. So you've got two sides, right? You've got, uh, the before and  after the green stuff is what it's using to sample from. So it's saying, I'm gonna use all of this stuff to try  and mush out the stick,  but it's also saying, I'm gonna use this part of the bowl. And you can't really see it in there. But what you should do is click on minus  and say, actually don't use the bowl.

Silly Photoshop, okay? And just go around and just remove the bits  and you'll find you get a lot better, um,  results on this side. Okay? Same with this. I don't want any of that in there  and I'm gonna hit plus. And, um, it's, it's already good, so I'm just kind  of messing around with it, just for instance.

But you can go through and say all of this,  it's really handy when it's kind of pulling out perspectives  and you're like, not that bad, but this bit you can tell  as a person, the  Computer's trying to do its best. But okay, the other thing you can do if you're getting bad  results, I'm, I'm, I'm counting that as a good result. What you can do is play around with color adaption, okay? Go through and just play with these options. And it just don't worry too much about  what color adaption is, just think of them as option E, B,  and C and you just get very different results. You can see this very high here is not working  for me in this instance.

I wouldn't say very high doesn't work at all. Just every, every image and every selection is different. So play around with that. Then when you're finished,  what we're gonna do, output two, we're gonna go  to duplicate layer. Just so we've got a whole new layer  with our little guy removed. Let's click on duplicate layer.

Let's click okay down the bottom here. And we're gonna go to select deselect layers. That's not what I want. Just gonna select  and let's just go to deselect selection, uh,  deselect layers and click sit down here. Anyway, what you'll notice is I can turn the eye on  and this one behind and this top one on  and off, ah, it's magic turning on and off. You can kind of start to see some of the artifacts,  but I promise, wow, I feel like  that's like totally not viewable  or seeable looks pretty amazing to me.

So let's make sure this top one's on and it's selected. And I want you to do like a little shimmy  'cause that is pretty amazing. Uh, the select, uh, the Select Object Tool, okay,  I keep calling it Select Object Tool. It's called the Object Select Tool, Dan. Okay? And it's hidden in this little group.

Uh, it's great for just picking out one little piece,  like where, let's grab this. It's, it's not perfect, but it gives you a really like,  pretty amazing first selection, right? So it is really good if there's like  multiple things in a document  that you only want one of them. There is a better option is, uh,  if you've got just say you wanna select everything in the  option, uh, sorry, in the image, okay? So it's deselect the option of select subject. It's been around a little while.

This selects all the objects in it using a very similar te  uh, like technology. Okay? But that might be more useful here. So Select object is good when you want one part  of a bigger group of people or objects. Okay? So that's super useful.

Another thing you can do with the, uh,  object selection tool is we've been  using the rectangle option. There's a lasso option. So say there's something that's just a bit weirder, like,  you know, you can't get a full square around it. I can get a square around all of this,  but let's say you just click hold and drag around. And like Adobe said to me, you need  to be about 20% kind of extra. I don't really know what that means.

So just give it good birth around the  outside and it's pretty good. Don't try and get really close to it. All right, let's select deselect  and move on to the next video.
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