The art of selections

Hello,

I've been kind of struggeling with making selections in Adobe Photoshop CS5. In the you tube and adobe website tutorials/examples I've seen it seems people make the perfect selection with ease. Yet I seem to be unable to do so.

For instance, I have a picture of my oldtimer car that I would like to select just the car body. Whichever method of selection I use, the result is not as good as I would have liked. The magnetic lasso for instance somehow is incapable of selecting the outer lines of the bodywork and often jumps inward to deep.

The only way I have had some succes was in Paint shop pro, where I could use a point to point selection. But it's a slow process and takes hours to select each individual part (windows, mirrors etc). But in PS CS5 I can't seem to get it done even though it is said to be easy.

And if I have trouble selecting such clear lines as a car body I don't even want to think about selecting a portrait with hair or the dog!

Can anyone help me improve my selections?

Generally speaking (in my experience anyway) a good selection is anything but easy.

The tutorials you see generally hand pick a specific photo to showcase a method (like using one channel as a start point).

I've resigned myself to using the polygonal lasso or the pen tool, depending on what I'm trying to select, and the tedium that comes with them.

You can literally select anything in Photoshop if you use the appropriate tools. The lasso tools are rather elementary when compared to more powerful tools like Calculations, Color Range, the Pen tool, and Channel based selections.

Entire books have been written on this topic and the one I found most useful is "Adobe Photoshop Unmasked: The Art and Science of Selections, Layers, and Paths" by Nigel French.

If you're really looking for help its best to post a sample image and they'll be lots of people who would advise you how to select particular elements of the image.

Go here (http://www.russellbrow​n.com/tips_tech.html) and watch some of the vidoes with the workd "masking" in the title. Prepare to have your mind blown.

My selections got alot better the day I took the time to learn how to use the pen tool properly. It is a powerful tool and I make most of my selections with this. The other method is to use channels and there are a number of tutorials around on using this. I believe that Scott Kelby has a better part of a whole book on this subject alone.

It takes time, practice and patience but you will get better. It is certainly not the kind of thing that you can do immediately after buying Photoshop, imo.

Eurogranada wrote in post #10330382
it seems people make the perfect selection with ease.

Anything is possible in most cases, but it will cost a lot of work for difficult images.
It get's "easier" with experience. But even then, it will still cost time.

There is no "magic mouse click".
TANSTAAFL

Eurogranada wrote in post #10330382
Can anyone help me improve my selections?

Sure:
http://dekedotcom.blip​.tv/

For the "clear lines as a car body": Pen tool, without a doubt.

Selecting areas in PS.