MARKHEAPS
> The Perfect Selection
COMPLEX SELECTIONS: THE TATTOO An interesting question was posed recently in one of the Photoshop groups I follow on social media: How would you select a tattoo design on a person? There was your usual array of responses ranging from “Use the Magic Wand tool” to “I’d trace it with the Pen tool.” No answer is wrong if it gets the job done at a quality that’s satisfactory to you or your client. What is surprising, though, is that people are seeing the “object” of the tattoo, and not the “tonality” of it. in this issue on how Select Subject has been improved for selecting portraits in the recent June Photoshop update.) You can see here, where the tattoo has been copied to a separate layer, that the Object Selection tool made a good selection on the first pass, but it’s basically still an
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For example, the Object Selection tool (W), which is a fairly recent addition to Photoshop CC, will make quick work of this. Just set its Mode to Lasso in the Options Bar, draw a freeform selection around the tattoo, and then let the artificial intelligence (AI) go to work. This tool is still truly amazing to most users who have been editing for more than 10 years, and it’s continuing to advance with machine learning and every Photoshop update. (Check out Kristina Sherk’s article
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object. If we want the “design” of the tattoo, we need all those little blends and details between the line work. What’s really worth noticing is that there aren’t a lot of tones in this tattoo; it’s basically a grayscale-shaded tattoo on a human skin tone, which means it can be more isolated by tone, and then converted into a selection via a few simple steps. You can find the image that we’re using in this tutorial by clicking here.
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STEP ONE: ISOLATE THE TONES Using a Black & White Adjustment layer (Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Black & White), you can target and “blow out” the colors of the skin to as bright a value as possible. Try to find the right amount that doesn’t erase many details from the tattoo. Most skin tone hues exist in the red and yellow frequencies of the color spectrum, so if we push the reds and yellows all the way over, it will make the subject’s skin tones white or close to white.
