Photoshop CS5: The Missing Manual

Selecting by Color

In addition to giving you tools to select areas by shape, Photoshop lets you select areas by color. This option is 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 tools to choose from, and in the next several pages, 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 a few strokes of an adjustable brush. As you paint with the Quick Selection tool, your selection expands outward 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 (The Magic Wand), as you can see in Figure 4-7.

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

To use this wonderfully 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 ...