If you need to quickly select an area of similar color such as replacing the sky or a green screen Magic Wand is your tool.

Activate Magic Wand by hitting (W) key or select it from the tool box.

Magic wand works by selecting similar colors in your photo, so if you have a photo of  a model in front of a solid color background you can use magic wand to automatically select and delete the entire background. Of course you might not always have the luxury to use a nice clean background so here are some tools to make your life easier.

Above is the first half of the magic wand menu. If one click is not enough to cover your entire selection you can use the add (or hold Shift while selecting), subtract (or hold Alt/Option while selecting), or create intersection(or hold Alt/Option + Shift while selecting) icons to help you expand and perfect your selections.

Tolerance value determined how much similar color Photoshop should pick up. If the object you are trying to select is fairly evenly toned you will only need to low Tolerance value to work, but if your background is poorly lit and has too much variation, you might want to go with a higher value. The only problem with setting high Tolerance is that you might end up selecting colors you do not need so it might be better to set the Tolerance low and use the Add/Subtract function.

Anti-Alias, it will make the edge of your selection a bit softer to create the illusion that the edge is smoother.

Contiguous selection will only select area that are connected. See the example below, I tried to select the white background with Contiguous on, it does not select the white background isolated by the pink heel and the black heel. If I turn contiguous off, it now selects the isolated area but also everything else that looks like the white background such as the highlight area on the heel.

Turning Contiguous off might save you a few click but you will also risk selecting areas you do not need, you are better off leaving Contiguous on and use the Add/subtract selecting technique discussed earlier.

By default Sample All layers is turned off, magic wand will only work off of the active layer, even though you can see the layer below magic wand will still ignore it. Once Sample All Layers is turned on, magic wand sample everything that is currently visible.

In addition to Tolerance, you can also change how much color magic wand will consider as similar by changing the Eyedropper sample size.

Select Eyedropper tool (I), under the option bar, choose a bigger sample size.

A 31x31 average means it will look at the closest 31x31 pixel area and use the average value of that entire area instead of sampling one color pixel. It will be useful if the object has a lot of tone/value variation.

You can refine the selection by expanding, contracting or softening the edge and even automatically retrace the edges using the Refine Edge Tool. It is available in most selection tool such as lasso or marquee, you can also find it under the Menu Select-Refine Edge or with shortcut Alt/Option+Ctrl/Command+R. Read my article about Refine Edge here.

This is part of my tutorial set. Please visit the TUTORIAL PAGE for a list of all the tutorials.

Here is the a split version of the photo before and after.

In this tutorial I will show you how to quickly increase the saturation in LAB space, LAB uses Lightness, A and B instead of red, blue and green channel. The advantage of using LAB (pronounced L – A – B, not lab) is you can manipulate the color without influencing the tone which is controlled by the L channel.

I've changed the color space to LAB mode and strengthen the contrast of the AB channel to increase the saturation and give it higher contrast by manipulating the lightness channel. The rest are just adding special effects such as blur and creating a more pleasing color value. The effects I add was glowing effect by duplicating one copy and blurring it and increase the contrast so that more highlight shows, than blur it again. After blurring it twice set the correct blending mode and turn down the opacity if necessary, go ahead and experiment with the effect to see what you come up with.

If you have questions please leave comments. Thanks!

This is part of my tutorial set. Please visit the TUTORIAL PAGE for a list of all the tutorials.

Electrifying text effects

Here is a tutorial on how to create a electrifying text effects in photoshop.

Start by creating your text and ctrl+click this layer to select all visible pixel, than on a new layer expand the selection by about 10-20 percents and fill it in with grey.

Use a MEDIAN filter to connect the letters together but not too much, just enough so that the letters are still legible.

Now add a layer effect with a metallic bevel effect. Now merge the text and the grey filled layer together.

Apply an ocean ripple filter, and a second layer on the panel with glowing edge filter, this will give it a electricity feeling.

Use Color Range to select the brightest area and on a new layer fill it with white. Hide the original layer.

Now apply a layer effect with outer glow with the color you want.

This is part of my tutorial set. Please visit the TUTORIAL PAGE for a list of all the tutorials.

So I created my own set of shortcut list to print out, each grouped into smaller categories so that I can find the exact shortcut I want with one glimps. Learning shortcuts in Photoshop will speed up your work by at least 40%! ...ok ok I lied, I made that number up, but shortcut really speeds things up significantly, they will give you more time to learn and create instead of wasting it on finding the right tool on the menu, try them out.

Here is some of the more useful shortcuts in Photoshop that I use regularly. You will see a star* next to some of the shortcut names, that is because they are not part of the default set, you will have to go into the shortcut key menu to change them, but for the most part it stays the same. I hope you find my custome shortcuts useful and I encourage you to find your own set of shortucuts. Click here to download the file so you can upload them onto your Photoshop.

Custome photoshop shortcut list

This is part of my tutorial set. Please visit the TUTORIAL PAGE for a list of all the tutorials.

Here is the video of the sketching process, you can read below for details.

I start with a grayish background for mid tone and just start sketching the shape of the face.

I didn't really sketch everything in detail because I will leave that for later, but for now I blocked in some of the shadow areas to make the shape more three dimensional.

Next I blocked in some highlights and the basic shape of the hair. At this point I have a better view of what the final picture will look like, so it is good to start make some major changes before its too late such as the shape of the head, position of the eyes and so on.

Than I added some streaks of hair to show the direction of the hair flow.

After you are done blocking in the basic shapes and final positioning of the facial features you can start defining the detail on the face.

In the final picture I brighten up the drawing and even out the tone and added fine streaks of hair.