Photoshop CC 2018 Select Subject
InDesign & Graphic Design Training
At long last here is the new Select Subject Tool in Photoshop CC 2018 which, as its name suggests lets you select the main subject of the photo usually an animal or person but with a single click after which you go into Select and Mask to refine the subject selection. It’s all thanks to Adobes new ‘AI’ technology known as Adobe Sensei which is behind the Adobe Stock search engine. Enough of the technical already and lets take a look at how it works.
The image below shows a one click selection when using the Select Subject Tool. In essence what this tool does is find the most prominent part of a photo then selects – similiar but not similiar to Quick Select as you don’t need to drag around the area. You probably will need to refine the Select Subject afterwards though with Select and Mask Refinements.
Not bad for one click?
Smart Select in Photoshop
Make sure you have either Quick Select or Wand active in Photoshop to activate the Options Bar
As you can see the ‘Select Subject’ & ‘Select & Mask’ are now available to use
So how do we do this?
Click on the subject to be selected but be aware this is not the answer to everything – some tweaking to get a more exact selection will be needed in the with ‘Select & Mask’s refinement tools. But to be fair this is not bad for starters and its not the easiest image as its a black and white with little definition.
*Note the Select & Mask tool will be covered in a future Photoshop tutorial
Subject Select Misses
Once the selection had been made I decided to apply a quick mask to the image to see how accurate the Subject Select tool had been – again to be fair – not to shabby. There are a number of areas which need refining – the actual edge between the selection and the background plus a couple of other areas which to draw your attention to I’ve circled below.
*Working with Masks is also part of the ‘Select & Mask’ tool
Keep an eye on the blog for the Select and Mask tutorial coming shortly. This tool is now covered in the Photoshop CC 2018 Introduction Training course – which can be viewed from the Courses page above.
