Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Selecting Irregular Areas

As you might imagine, areas selecting by colorthat aren’t uniform in shape or color can be a real bear to select. Luckily, Photoshop has a few tools in its arsenal to help you get the job done as easily as possible. In this section, you’ll learn about the three lassos and the Pen tool, as well as a few ways to use these tools together to select hard-to-grab spots.

WORKAROUND WORKSHOP: Erasing Every Bit of Background

Now that you know how to use the Background and Magic Erasers, keep in mind that you can’t always believe what you see onscreen. Most of the time, you’ll use these tools to erase to a transparent (checkerboard) background like the one shown in Figure 5-13. And while it may appear that you’ve erased all the background, you may not have. The checkerboard pattern is notorious for making it hard to see whether you’ve missed a pixel or two here and there, especially if the background you’re trying to delete is white or gray (like clouds).

Fortunately, it’s easy to overcome this checkered obstacle. The next time you’re ready to use one of these eraser tools, first create a new Solid Color Fill layer, then pick a bright color that contrasts with what you’re trying to delete and place the layer at the bottom of the layer stack. That way, you can see whether you’ve erased everything you wanted to. (Alternatively, if you’re erasing the background of one image only to replace it with another, go ahead and add the new background to your document.)

Here’s how: ...