Selections and Cutouts - The Photoshop: Professional Retouching and Compositing Tips, Tricks, and Techniques - page 4

Let's kick off by going through a number of techniques for making selections and cutouts.
As always with Photoshop, there are countless ways to achieve the same or similar results.
In this chapter I take you through the techniques I use most often in my own workflow.
Making selections can be frustrating. I'm sure you'd much rather spend your time being
creative than making selections, but there are times that they're unavoidable, especially
when compositing. But with a little knowledge and a little practice, you'll soon find that
they don't take much time at all.
Quick Selection Tool and Refine Edge
When the Quick Selection tool was introduced, it seemed everyone I spoke to was achiev-
ing incredible results; for me, though, it was quite a different story.
Sure, simple selections were no problem, but when it came to getting a great selection of
both body and hair, I ran into issues.
The solution I found was to use the Quick Selection tool to make two selections—one of
the body, one of the hair—and then combine them.
1. With a suitable image open (that is, one in which the cutout includes fly-away
hair), choose the Quick Selection tool from the toolbar ( Figure 1.1 ) , and in the op-
tions at the top of the screen make sure that the Add to Selection icon is turned on
(middle option) and that the Auto Enhance checkbox is selected ( Figure 1.2 ) .