Whenever I give workshops on Photoshop, I always wind up including some instruction on selection and masking. Whether it’s a group of beginners or some who have spent some time with the program, there’s always a new trick to learn when it comes to extracting objects and images.

During a recent online worksession with Saulter, we were tossing around ideas for a graphic-based navigation bar for a current project. Using source photos of a variety of boxes, I wanted to quickly mask out the white background against which the boxes were photographed against. During times like these, when ideas are coming fast, sometimes I wish I could hold the digital image in my hands and use a pair of digital scissors to quickly snip it out. Until then, I’ve found the following to be the best way to cut out simple objects quick and dirty.

Masking Box from Tridea Design on Vimeo.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of what Refine Edge can do.

In some cases, we need to remove a background that has a lot of tiny spaces. In the example below, I show how to get even the background color in all those tiny crevices out. It’s a very handy function, and also one of the fastest ways to handle something with this amount of complexity.

Masking Bonsai Tree from Tridea Design on Vimeo.

Here’s a view at the quality between a wand-tool selection for the mask against the Color Range + Refine Edge method.

Whether you know these tricks or not, I certainly hope you will make use of them in your next design comp! Until next time!