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Colour Range Selections with Photoshop April 07 2005

Suppose you have an image that has an object on an background. If the background image is somewhat different than the image in the foreground (colour wise) then you can select by colour range. This technique I have found to be very useful when removing backgrounds from objects. The basic steps are as follows:

1. Select the colour range tool (Select Menu -> Color Range…)
2. In the Color Range dialog, change the select ion preview to “Quick Mask”
3. Use the eyedropper tool from the Color Range dialog to select the initial colour you want to select.
4. Use the “Add to mask” tool from the Color Range dialog to add similar colours to the selection. As the colours are selected, the image will become more blue. The blue parts indicate what is being added to the selection where the red is what is not.
5. Once you have selected the colour areas that you want to remove, increase or decrease the Fuzziness to sharpen or blur the selection.
6. The image should have a marquee around the selected colours.
7. Create a layer from the current one by double clicking on the layer in the layer’s dialog.
8. Now create a layer mask in order to reveal the object in the foreground. We will do this by hiding the selected colour range. In the Layer menu select Add Layer Mask -> Hide all.
9. There may be some parts of your object that were removed with the colour range selection. You can get these areas back by using Black and paintbrush over these areas. Black adds the original and white removes as long as you are working on the layer mask rather than directly on the layer (check the box beside the current layer -> square with circle = layer mask, brush = layer )

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