The second concept of understanding Photoshop has to do with selection. Selecting words in a wordprocessor is easy, since each word is discretely stored and recognized due to the preceding and trailing space. Since an image is just a collection of pixels, “telling” Photoshop to select, say a dancer in a photograph striking a pose in the foreground of the famous Khujaraho temple is not possible.
In fact, making selections in Photoshop is indeed a highly creative process in itself. Amateur users manually trace around shapes they recognize in the image using the mouse, thereby drawing a selection. Experienced users employ a variety of tools and techniques to make the job more effortless and accurate.
The web is dotted with thousands of tips and techniques shared by Photoshop users and gurus on how to make selections. Each version of Photoshop has incrementally added more tools and techniques to make the process more advanced and at the same time, easier. Photoshop 6 excels with its new enhanced Extract Image tool (Figure 02: Extracting a boon).
Figure 02 Extracting a Boon Extracting Shiva’s Nandi bull from the stockmarkets is relatively easy with the enhanced Extract Image dialog box with new smart highlighting, mask edge, and mask cleanup tools.
So essentially Photoshop is all about making selections and re-coloring pixels.
is easy, since each word is discretely stored and recognized due to the preceding and trailing space. Since an image is just a collection of pixels, “telling” Photoshop to select, say a dancer in a photograph striking a pose in the foreground of the famous Khujaraho temple is not possible.