Page 53 - CC2017_PS_Look_Inside

Stage 3 Creating Complex Selections

At this stage of the project, you still have a few issues to resolve: some of the images are still randomly
stacked on top of one another, and some images have areas that are hiding other images (the blue sky
in the Skyline layer, for example). In this stage, you start fixing these problems.
Virtually any Photoshop project involves making some kind of selection. Making selections is so
important, in fact, that there are no fewer than nine tools dedicated specifically to this goal, as well as a
whole Select menu and a few other options for making and refining selections.
In an earlier lesson you learned how to use the Rectangular Marquee tool to draw simple
selections. In the next series of exercises, you use several other selection methods to isolate pixels from
their backgrounds (called silhouetting).

mAke A FeAthered seleCtion in A smArt objeCt

Smart Object layers are actually links to the files that are placed. If you open the linked
file and make changes, those changes are automatically reflected in the file where the
Smart Object layer exists. In this exercise, you will explore one of the advantages and
disadvantages of Smart Object layers.
1. With aftermath.psd open, hide all but the Lightning layer.

2. Double-click the Lightning layer thumbnail to open the Smart Object file in
its own window. If you see a warning message, click OK.
This message tells you that you must save the Smart Object with the same name for the
changes to reflect in the aftermath file. You can’t use the Save As function to save the file
with a different name or in a different location.
Note:

Double-click the If you don’t see this
Smart Object layer message, you can open
thumbnail to open the General pane of the
the linked file. Preferences dialog box
and click the Reset All
The Lightning.jpg file opens separately, appearing by default as a separate tab at the top Warning Dialogs button.
of the document window. This is a JPEG file, which means it is a flat file with only a
locked Background layer.

The Lightning image is a
flat image, which means
it has only a Background
layer that is locked.

3. Close the Lightning.jpg file.
Your goal in this exercise is to create a transparent area around the actual lightning bolt.

Flat files (including JPEG) do not support transparency. To save the file with
transparency, you should save it as a native Photoshop file with the PSD extension.
However, as the warning message indicated, you must save the Smart Object file with
the same name — which includes the file extension.
Because you can’t save transparency in a JPEG file, you need to break the link to the
original JPEG file before you can create that transparency in the composite file.

Project 1: Composite Movie Ad 63