Real World Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers: Industrial-Strength Imaging Techniques

Chapter Nine. Making Selections

You love the painting and retouching tools that Photoshop offers; you love layers; you even love all the options it gives you for saving files. But as soon as someone says alpha channel or mask, your eyes glaze over.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Masks, channels, and selections are actually really easy once you get past their bad reputation. Making a good selection is obviously important when silhouetting and compositing images—two of the most common production tasks. But perhaps even more important, selections are also a key ingredient for nondestructive tonal corrections, color corrections, sharpening, and even retouching. We discussed some of these in the previous chapter, and we’ll explore them further in later ...