Photoshop 101 – Starting with the Fundamentals

Our Graphic Designer, Mike Jans, walks us through the fundamentals of Adobe Photoshop!

Hi everybody. Michael B. Jans here. I will be doing some photoshop fundamentals today and I will be replacing the background of your favorite picture.

First, you want to get your subject right in the center, looking good. Move over here to the Quick Selection tool, click on it. We want to grab all of this background so adjust your brush size to a larger size. Let’s go with 80. Make sure your hardness is at 100%. Enter, hit return, and just drag across this background. It’ll grab large swaths of this color and also get this baseboard as well.

Now you’ll see, it got some of her foot and a little bit of her goggles, but that’s okay. So we’re gonna zoom in here, going to grab the magnifying tool, click on her foot, and drag to the right. Oops, looks like we’ve gone too close, so hold Option. You’ll see the plus in the center has turned into a minus. Hold Option, click, drag left a little bit, zoom out a bit and go back to your Quick Selection tool. You’re going to want to make this a little bit smaller because you want to do some fine work.

Let’s do about 20. Sound good? And we’re going to hold option again and turn the plus into a minus in the center of the circle. You get her foot and get this part of her shoe right here, hold option, and drag it across her foot. We’re also going to get the bottom of the shoe as well. Hold Option, grab all of that, and you can zoom out using the magnifying glass tool. But also, a quick tip is hold Command or Apple and hit 0 and it goes all the way to full screen.

So now, you want to zoom back into her goggles, quick selection tool, hold option and let’s remove this selection of her goggles. Done. Zoom out. Now, what you want to do is select the subject. Right now, you have the background selected but you want the subject. So you move up to Select, Inverse, and now you have the subject. Go all the way down to the right in your layers palette, hit the Add Layer Mask, and it removes the background. Now, we’re going to hit the eyeball tool, the eyeball spot.

Now she’s flying through the sky. That’s it. Pretty easy. Now try photoshop at home. 

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