10 Tips and Tricks for Making Difficult Selections in Photoshop

If you’re just starting out in Photoshop and would like to learn the art of making difficult selections to isolate things in photos, check out this great video tutorial by Tutvid. It’s a 37-minute lesson with 10 tips and tricks on methods that range from beginner to advanced.

“Learn to make virtually ANY selection and cut out anything you would even need in Photoshop,” writes Nate Dodson. “We’ll make simple, straight-line selections with the Poly Lasso tool, we’ll select car parts with the Pen Tool and edit the path, we’ll use Calculations to create extremely intricate and difficult selections VERY quickly, we’ll learn to use and work with Select and Mask as well as Refine Edge, we’ll build a selection based on a single channel, and SO much more!”

In case you’d like to skip around, here’s a little “table of contents” for the video:

00:35: Quick Selection
03:35: Select and Mask
07:14: Refine Edge
08:58: Poly Lasso
12:42: Pen Tool
16:54: Using a Channel
22:54: Calculations
26:19: Color Range
29:09: Quick Mask
31:13: Post Selection
32:26: Defringe

You could dive much deeper into each of these techniques, of course, but the several minutes spent on each one should be a great crash course that’ll help you hit the ground running.