Easily Selecting Highlights, Shadows, and Midtones.
"Reach for the Sky!"
You take a photo exposing for the shadows, in the hopes that your camera will capture most of the information that lies within the highlights. You open it up, and bummer! Not even the RAW file contains the stuff you need to recover that bright white sky. So in typical Photoshop mastermind fashion, you devise a plan to replace all that white stuff with a beautiful sky photo you took another day.
But how do we select those highlights? And what if we want to select the shadows or the midtones? It's dead simple.
Selections, Selections, and Selections.
All three of those things are possible within the Select > Color Range tool. Once you have your image loaded up and have opened up Color Range you'll be presented with a few simple options.
The "Select" Drop-down Menu.
Two (Potentially Grayed Out) Options "Detect Faces" & "Localized Color Clusters".
Fuzziness Slider.
Range Slider.
Selection Preview.
Selection Types
The "Select" drop-down allows you to choose how you want Color Range to build its selection. You have a few options here as well:
Sampled Colors.
A Whole Bunch of Colors.
Highlights, Midtones, and Shadows.
Skin Tones
Out of Gamut
Let's break these down- When you select Sampled Colors, simply clicking on your image or in the Color Range thumbnail will base a selection around that color. You can hold down shift to select a different range of colors to add in to the selection.
All of the color options do just what you'd expect them to do. They select the colors that correspond to the option you chose. There are no options available for these settings.
The Highlights, Midtones, and Shadows options also do exactly as you'd expect them to do. They'll select all the highlights, midtones, or shadows in your image. There are a few options here which we'll touch on next.
The Skin Tones option selects all of the skin tones in your image. It's very useful for targeting a selection towards the subject in a portrait shot. You also have the option of using "Face Detection" to target human faces specifically detected by Photoshop. Nifty!
Finally there is Out of Gamut. This one is a bit more advanced and I won't go into it here, but to simplify it you're selecting all the colors that are outside of the colors that can be displayed in CMYK. In Photoshop, you're usually working in RGB for photography so this option is specifically useful for print publications.
Fuzziness and Range
There are two ominous sliders sitting below the selection type drop-down, but don't be afraid! They're dead simple.
Fuzziness determines how far to follow the current selection. For example, a fuzziness of 1 will select only the absolute highlights, while a fuzziness of 50 will start to bleed into softer highlights- Creating a more realistic selection.
Range determines what Photoshop should define as a highlight, mid-tone, or shadow.
Dragging it to the right in Highlight mode will start to limit your highlight selection to only the brightest highlights, while dragging it to the left in Shadow mode will start to only select the near pure black shadows.
In Midtone mode, you select a range of values to define as the mid-tone. The area between the two slider arrows in midtone mode are all of the tonalities you'll be selecting.
Selection Preview and Creating Your Selection
The Selection Preview option allows you to change how your selection is previewed in the main Photoshop window. There are various different options, and each one comes down to personal preference. I prefer Greyscale as it gives you the best contrast to determine what is selected and what isn't.
Finally, to accept the awesome-ness that is your selection, hit OK. Your selection will be loaded into Photoshop in the oh-so-familiar ant lines selection preview.
To save it, I recommend creating a new blank layer and hitting the little box with the circle in it to create a layer mask. You can also save it to a channel by right clicking it with a selection tool active, and choosing "Save Selection".
If you have any questions, don't be afraid to ask in the comments below! Have any good ideas for a tutorial? Comment some in and I'll be sure to take a look!
Thanks for reading!
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