Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Selecting by Color

Photoshop also has several tools that let you select areas by color. They’re helpful when you want to select a chunk of an image that’s fairly uniform in color, like someone’s skin, the sky, or the paint job on a car. Photoshop has lots of color-selecting tools to choose from, and in this section, you’ll learn how to pick the one that best suits your needs.

The Quick Selection Tool

The Quick Selection tool is shockingly easy to use and lets you create complex selections with just a few brushstrokes. As you paint with this tool, your selection expands to encompass pixels similar in color to the ones you’re brushing across. It works insanely well if there’s a fair amount of contrast between what you want to select and everything else. This tool lives in the same toolset as the Magic Wand, as you can see in Figure 4-7.

Figure 4-7. You can press the W key to activate the Quick Selection tool. (To switch between it and the Magic Wand, press Shift-W.) When you activate the Quick Selection tool, the Options bar sports icons that let you create a new selection as well as add to—or subtract from—the current selection.

To use this friendly tool, click anywhere in the area you want to select or drag the brush cursor across it, as shown in Figure 4-8. When you do that, Photoshop thinks for a second and then creates a selection based on the color of the pixels you clicked or brushed ...