Photoshop CS4 Studio Techniques- P4: Staring at a shelf full of Photoshop books at the local bookstore, it seems that there are more special-effect “cookbooks” and technical tomes than anyone would ever care to read. The problem is that none of those “cookbooks” provide enough detail to really let you feel like you understand the program | Chapter2 Selection Primer Figure You can view your selection composited against different backgrounds. 2008 Dan Ablan. Modify The features in the Modify menu Select Modify have helped artists out of many sticky situations. At first glance it might not be obvious why you would ever use these commands but they ll be very handy as you continue through the book. The following list describes the commands Border Selects a border of pixels centered on the current selection. If you use a setting of 10 the selection will be 5 pixels inside the selection and 5 pixels outside the selection. You can use this command to remove pesky halos that appear when you copy an object from a light background and paste it onto a darker background Figures and . Smooth Attempts to round off any sharp corners in a selection Figure . This trick can be especially useful when you want to create a rounded-corner rectangle. 76 I Working Foundations Figure The original selection. 2008 Dan Ablan. Figure A 10-pixel border. Figure Smooth 16 pixels. Expand Enlarges the current selection while attempting to maintain its shape Figure . This command works well with smooth freeform selections but it might not be the best choice for straight-edged selections because the selection might expand beyond the corners of the image. Contract Reduces the size of the current selection while attempting to maintain its shape Figure . The highest setting available is 16. If you need a higher setting just use the command more than once. Figure Expand 12 pixels. Figure Contract 12 pixels. 77 Chapter2 Selection Primer Figure The selection area is outside the image because of a feathered selection. Feather Unlike the Feather option in the selection tools this command affects only the selection that s currently active it has no effect on future selections. You can t reduce the amount of feathering with this command once it s applied. Therefore if you apply it once .
