Quick Paths with the Magic Wand
Level: Intermediate; Requires basic understanding and familiarity with the pen, add anchor point, delete anchor point, convert point, path selection and direct path selection tools.
Since we'll be using the magic wand tool for this tutorial, the technique shown here is best used in situations where the section of the image you want to cut out is not on top of a super intricate background.
- Open the image.
- Select the magic wand tool and click on the background. If the entire background is not selected in one click, hold shift and while clicking on the remaining areas.
- Hit cmd+shift+i to invert the selection or shift+ctrl+i if you're on Windows. You should now have something that looks like this.
- Select the Paths tab and click on the "make work path from selection" button at the bottom of the Paths window. Now we have a nice path that we can edit easily with the Path Selection, Direct Path Selection, and Pen tools.
- Now it's time to make the path nice and smooth. Its best to zoom in and do this in sections. Using some combination of the pen, add anchor point, delete anchor point, convert point and path selection tools shape your path around the image.
- If you have multiple paths, select the direct selection tool and draw a rectangle around your image to select all the paths. Go to the paths pallet, click on the "load path as a selection" button.
- Go to the layers pallet and click the "Add layer mask" button. If you feel like the image still isn't right, you can go back to your path and keep working on it and reload the mask again. You should now have a nice cutout that looks something like this.
posted Apr 24, 11:47 PM |
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