505 Two ways to select a silhouette in Photoshop

- Hey, gang. This is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now last week I showed you how to take a snake and make it longer inside Photoshop and then turn it into a silhouette and I know you thought it was stupid. I might have, too, but everybody else loved it. It was so darn popular, which is why this week I'm gonna show you how to select this silhouette or any other silhouette for that matter exactly, precisely, accurately as demonstrated here inside the Quick Mask mode and I'm gonna show you a couple of different ways to approach this. It's very intriguing stuff.

All with the intention of setting the snake inside of this photo montage. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, it's time to select that snake. Now, it's very dark; in many places black set against the white background. So no matter what, it's gonna select itself. So if you're an expert, all you have to do is switch over to the Channels panel and then press the ctrl key or the cmd key on the Mac and go ahead and click on RGB and that will select everything that's white inside this image.

Another way to work, I'll go ahead and press ctrl + d or cmd + d on a Mac, is to drop down to this icon at the bottom of the Channels panel, the one that reads, "Load Channel As Selection" and just go ahead and click on it. Either way, you select the white stuff, you don't select the black stuff, and the shades of gray in between get selected to varying degrees depending on how bright they are. Now what we really want to select is the snake and to do that, you go up to the Select menu and choose the Inverse command. And now notice that we have a selection outline exactly in the shape of a snake and to test it out I'll go ahead and press ctrl + z or cmd + z on a Mac to undo that move.

I'll switch to the Layers panel and click on the top layer here and then I'lll press ctrl + shift + n or cmd + shift + n on a Mac in order to create a new layer and I'll call it something like, full snake and then I'll click OK. And now I'll go ahead and turn all the middle layers off by dragging over their eyeballs so only the background and this new layer are selected and then with black as my foreground color, I'll press alt + backspace or opt + delete on a Mac in order to fill the snake with black. And now I'll click off of it in order to deselect it and if you zoom on in, you're going to see every bit of detail associated with that snake with no bad edges whatsoever.

So none of those artifacts that you end up getting with, for example, the Magic Wand tool or the Quick Selection tool, everything looks absolutely fantastic. Let's say, though, that you're not such an expert or you're teaching somebody else how to pull this off and you want them to be able to understand everything that's happening. In that case we'll run through things again by turning off the full snake layer and turning on all the other layers by dragging over their eyeballs. And the first step is to go up to the Select menu and choose the All command or you can just press Ctrl + A or Cmd + A on a Mac.

The next step is to go up to the Edit menu and choose Copy Merged. Alright, now go ahead and turn all those layers off once again so that you're looking at nothing but the background layer and then switch to the Quick Mask mode at which point you're still gonna see white because, after all, everything is selected. Now what I want you to do is return to the Edit menu and choose the Paste command, or you can just press Ctrl + V or Cmd + V on a Mac, and you will paste in your snake. Now I'll go up to the Select menu and choose Deselect and now you want to go to the Image menu, choose Adjustments, and choose Invert and that will switch the Rubylith overlay.

So in other words, everything that's covered in Rubylith will be deselected, and everything that's white will be selected as soon as you exit the Quick Mask mode, which you can do by clicking on the icon down here at the bottom of the toolbox, or just pressing the "q" key and once again you get that exact same selection by the way. It was just a longer but potentially easier process to understand. Alright, now just to demonstrate that's the case, I'm gonna press ctrl + shift + n or cmd + shift + n on a Mac, to create yet another new layer and I'll call this, let's say, QM snake after the Quick Mask mode, and then I'll click OK and now I will once again press alt + backspace or option + delete on a Mac in order to fill the snake with black and you can see that he looks absolutely fantastic.

And that's how you turn any old pristine silhouette into a dead on accurate selection outline either by command clicking on the RGB composite in the Channels panel or by copying and pasting the image itself into the Quick Mask mode. Alright, now if you're a member of Lynda.com, I have a follow-up movie in which I show you how to take this snake and move him into a different environment. Not necessarily as an independent layer but as a selection outline. So in other words this if nothing else is really super useful information but then again, if you've had it up to here with the snakes, next week I have for you a rhinoceros and we're gonna take this classic illustration and we're gonna auto trace it inside of Illustrator.

This is now a piece of vector-based artwork that you can scale to any size that you like. Deke's Techniques each and every week! Keep watching.