A lot of people have been asking for this feature. Ever since Adobe added the ability to generate masks of people, faces and different parts of people to Lightroom and Camera RAW, Ive received a ton of communication from the community. “When will this feature be in Photoshop??” Well.. here it is!

Written steps coming soon

Hope you enjoy,

Drop a comment

Colin

The post Auto Select people and features in Photoshop appeared first on PhotoshopCAFE.

Sometime, you go to output an image and suddenly, the color changes. Or you are trying to combine 2 images and the colors change. What gives?
This tutorial shows you how to keep your colors matching perfectly and explain why they change, as well as how to prevent color shifts. The first part of this Photoshop tutorial, show you how to prevent color shift.

The 2nd part of this tutorial explains basic color management in Photoshop. Even if you are a beginner, these essential steps will help you work with consistent color throughout your workflow. This is not a tutorial on monitor calibration, It’s a tutorial on setting up Photoshop. This applies to any version of Photoshop.

Stop Photoshop changing colors on export

Start with a photo and you want to export a jpg. (This is a  photo, I made of talented musician, Taylor Davis.)

Choose File>Export>Save for web.

Usually it starts in the Optimized tab, showing a preview that may or may not match the original.

In this case, it’s close, but more saturated color than the original.

Here is the same image before I calibrated my monitor. The color is different but by more.

The more different this looks, the more you need to calibrate your monitor. Even a calibrated monitor, will be slightly different (with these settings) as you see in the first image.

‘

Here is another example of uncalibrated. When I change to the Original tab, it’s different again. You might be seeing these types of shifts. Which is the real color? (Tip: what you saw in Photoshop).

‘

If your colors are wildly off, or you have never calibrated your system, it will make a difference. This is not a tut on Calibration (I can do one, if I get requests). To calibrate, you will need a monitor that supports calibration. I use BenQ monitors. Disclosure, I am a BenQ ambassador, but the isn’t a sponsored tutorial and not a tutorial about monitor calibration. If about Photoshop color settings.

You will also need a device like the Calibrate Display Pro HL, If these is demand, I’ll do a tutorial on Monitor calibration.

How to view Accurate Color in Save from Web in Photoshop

Here is the first tip: Where it says preview in save for web, see if it says Monitor color

Change to Use Document profile. You should see a big difference. For many users, this alone will solve or greatly reduce the problem.

Notice how the colors now perfectly match (on a calibrated display).

The good news, even if the colors don’t match perfectly in Save for web, the output jpg or png image should still match the original.

Export as, an alternative way to export

Adobe wants us to use the newer Image>Export>Export as

You should notice the preview colors are closer to the original. The downside to Export as, is that lack of metadata and some other options, which leaves me still using the Save for web.

Hopefully, this helps you get better previews in save for web. Ok, now, lets set up Photoshop to give us perfect colors every time.

Basic Photoshop Color Management (Please read).

Within the RGB (Red, Green +Blue) world, there are different profiles (AKA color spaces).

• ProPhoto RGB supports the most colors (aka Largest Color Gamut), but not all colors can be displayed on your monitor.
• Adobe RGB is a reasonably large color space that can be displayed on monitors that boast 98%-100% Adobe RGB colors, this is common for printing to a desktop printer.
• sRGB is a smaller colorspace, but all the colors can be viewed on almost any monitor. Because of this, it’s the most common color space for sharing images online. Going to sRGB will cause you to lose some colors, so it’s best as an output file, not your working color.

There are other color spaces , such as P3 which is used by Apply on their devices and is also a good working color space for certain things. It’s a good idea to keep the original file in the largest color gamut possible, to preserve colors (in RAW, this doesn’t matter). Then work on your preferred profile for the image that you are going to output.

To view the color space in your image, choose Document profile from the bottom menu in Photoshop

Here this image is Adobe RGB. (16bpc means its a 16 bit file).

For my workflows, I use Adobe RGB and output to sRGB for sharing online and social media. (Some people use ProPhoto and their reasoning is it supports more colors and has a wider color gamut. For my needs right now, I prefer to be able to view all my colors on my monitor and use Adobe RGB and have a 99% Adobe RGB display on my Benq SW321C.

Please note, I shoot in RAW and store my images in Lightroom, so I don’t lose any color info on my originals. RAW files transcend any color space, because the RAW sensor data is preserved. If you don’t understand that statement, don’t worry, read on.

I set my settings to Adobe RGB in Lightroom and Photoshop, as well as on my camera.

Setting the  Default Color Profile

Choose Edit>Color Settings

This is where you choose the default colors Photoshop will use.

Working spaces>RGB this is where you choose the profile that you want to use. Whenever you create a new document, it will now be created into this space.

You can choose how Photoshop handles images that have a different profile, under Color Management Policies.

If the color profile is different than your working space (Adobe RGB in this case) :

Off: The color profile is removed from the image and it becomes untagged.

Preserve Embedded Profile: (my preferred choice) The image opens and the color space is unchanged. (You can manually change it with Image>Convert to Profile).

Convert To working RGB: Every image you open is automatically converted and tagged with the working space. For some people with a closed workflow, this might be a good choice. In my case, I working with different clients and across many different types of mediums, so I prefer to only change what I want to change and do that manually.

Converting Color Profiles

If you image profile is different, or to shows untagged (no color profile attached) then you need to convert it.

There is a wrong and right way to do this, If you choose Image>Assign Profile

You will notice Photoshop shifts the color as you change profiles.

Choose Image>Convert to Profile

Now you can change the profile without changing colors in your image.

If you follow the proceeding streps, you should have less issues with color mismatches.

Hopefully you found this helpful

Great to see you here at the CAFE

Colin

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Photoshop has just received a major update. I show you how to use the most important new features.

I will add the written steps soon, right now, this is a transcript of my video, watch the video and see what new.

00:42 Auto remove people 

02:49 Auto Remove Wires and Cables

04:17 Firefly 3 in Generative Fill

05:07 Firefly 3 in Generative Expand

06:00 Remove Background , Generate Background 

06:49 Batch Generate, Generative Workspace

Adobe has just updated Photoshop to Photoshop 2025. This is the annual big update where all the stuff comes together. I’ve made videos and other tutorials. I’ll link to them on how to do that update and make sure you can find the latest version. Now we’re going to look at the new features right now. And some of these features you might have seen before in beta, and now they’ve moved into the main Photoshop version. There’s going to be some features you have never seen before. They’re brand new. Now, I’m just going to touch I’m going to run everything very quickly in this video so you get an overview, bird’s-eye view, so to speak, of what’s new. And I’m going to be doing separate tutorials on these main new features and really digging into them. So let’s start with remove distraction, which is now in the main Photoshop. So if we go to the remove tool, which you’re going to find over here. If you don’t see the remove tool or you don’t see any tools, by the way, just go click on this little three-dont menu and hold, and then you’ll get customized toolbar.

And you’ll probably see the missing tools are here. And then just hit restore defaults, and then you’re good to go. All right, let’s get rid of these people in the background. So if we choose find distractions, it’s going to have the ability to choose people. So what it will do is it will highlight the people. If you wanted to keep one of these people, you would just paint over it with the minus key or just hold down the alt or the option key as you paint. If you wanted to also remove him, Just paint over him. And then when you’re happy with the people that you want to remove, just hit this little checkmark here. And now it will do the process of removing them using generative fill. Now, notice it wasn’t great. And that’s because we’ve got generative AI turned off. This is another new feature. Now we have the ability to use generative AI in here. So if we turn this on, now we’re going to force it to use generative AI, and we should get a better result. Let’s try it again. And let’s apply it. And as you can see there, now we get a much better result.

Now, you’re not going to get any variations. It’s automatically going to choose the best variation. Another thing to bear in mind is if we set this to auto, that means, generally speaking, when the area selected is larger than 1,000 pixels by 1,000, it’s going to use generative AI all the time. If that area is smaller, it’s not always going to use generative AI, which means that we can remove small distractions very quickly and easily without using generative AI or worrying about using those generative credits. Now, this also works with poles and wires. Now, I’ve done another video on this. We really went crazy and we just did the whole test. So in the other video, we just tested this and pushed it to the extreme. Check that out. I’ll link it. So the best way to use this is to create a new layer first. And then on that new layer, make sure you choose sample all layers. Otherwise, nothing will happen. Then we’re going to choose find distractions. This time we’re going to use wires and cables. Now, I did another video on this where I really went in-depth with this and pushed it hard.

And if you’re wondering what happened about the crack in, yes, you can apply it a second time and it will make it better. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out that video. I’ll add a link to it. And boom, look at that. It does a really good job of getting rid of it. However, we lost some of our subject here. And this is why you would want to use it on a layer. Because if we go in here and And we choose that layer and then we apply a layer mask, we can just grab a brush here, and let’s make it a high edge brush. I’m hitting the left bracket key to make it smaller. Let’s make that brush about the size of the wood there. Make sure we select the layer mask, Opacity, Flow, 100. And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to click right there and then just release. Now move to where you want that to end. Hold down that shift key. Make So you do it in exactly this order. Now click. And then what it’s going to do is it’s going to draw a straight line in between the two of these.

The reason that works is because we were just painting with black. And if you’re getting any value out of this video, hit that subscribe button, turn on notifications. You won’t miss any of my videos. All right, another thing that has changed is the generative fill is now using Firefly version 3 model. And yes, this makes a huge difference. Let me demonstrate. So I’m going to grab the Lasso And by the way, this is also in the main shipping version of Photoshop. So I’m just going to make a selection around that path. And maybe I didn’t quite go wide enough. Let’s go wider. And I want cobblestones on here. So why don’t we choose the Generate a Fill, and we’re going to type in cobbled path. And now we’re just going to hit Generate. And if you look at the result here, look at this. This is a massive improvement over what we were getting with the previous model. It’s just much, much nicer looking. Let’s also test it with generative expand, which is also now using Firefly version 3. So we’re going to grab our crop tool, and then we’re going to make sure for Phil that we’re using Generative Expand.

And let’s just drag it out a little bit and see how well it does with this cat. I just hit the Enter key, by the way. Well, that might be a little weird. There we go. A two-headed cat, just what we were looking for. Or if we grab that third variation, saved by the bell, that one works quite well. The other two, well, that’s interesting. I’m definitely going to say interesting. Maybe it’s two cats, but yeah, this is looking pretty good. One of the things you’ll notice, too, is there’s a bigger difference now between the variations with the Model 3 versus before. Previously, the variations were very similar. So here’s another one that’s interested, and that’s Generate Background. So what we’re going to do is we’re just going to choose Remove Background. And notice the background is now gone. We can go into the mask and we can clean it up. It does need some cleanup, but that’s a tutorial for another day, and we’re going to choose Generate Background. So let’s generate something else. Like maybe we want to be at the beach. Okay. So it’s generating some interesting-looking backgrounds. And once again, notice the variety of results we’re getting.

I think this is definitely the coolest one. And if we are worried about areas like here where we did lose a little bit of her shirt, we can just grab that mask. We’re going to grab a white brush and then just do some good old fashioned masking and we can just paint that back. All right, now I’m going to show something really cool. This one is brand new, and this particular one is just in the beta version at the moment. But if we go under the Edit menu, we have this generative workspace. Now this is brand new. And the generative workspace is really cool because what I can do is I can just type in a prompt, but we can do so much more than that. Let’s try a rock drummer in a band on stage in front of an audience. And we’re going to hit Generate. But the nice thing about this is while it’s generating, we can actually generate more than one at a time. So maybe we wanted to do something like a rock guitarist. And now I can hit Generate. And what it’s doing is it’s batch processing It’s actually stacking these up and doing one at a time.

So notice that we hit the rock drum that was actually at the bottom. There’s our drum, there’s our guitarists. And we can go through these and we can check them all out. That’s a lot of drumsticks. Now, these are not looking incredibly great, right? And I’ll tell you why. The reason is we’re actually in fast mode so we can quickly generate. So what you can do is you can try out your prompts, and then when you find something that’s working for you, we can change And if we’re going to change this from the fast mode to the normal, then we’re going to hit Generate. It’s going to take a little bit longer. Let’s go back into our list view. This time it’s going to take a little longer, but we’re going to get better quality. So that fast mode is a great way to just compound a bunch of different prompts to test it. And let’s have a look at this. And as you can see here, the quality of these are better than what we were getting. But the cool thing about this is we can actually do variables now. Let’s say a woman in a red T-shirt at the mall.

Let’s go back into the fast mode and we’re just going to hit Generate. Okay, so here we go. Now we’ve got a woman here in a red T-shirt at the mall. But what if we wanted to try maybe different colored shirts or maybe we wanted to try different locations? This is where we can use variables. So say right now we’re doing a red T-shirt. I can click on Add variable. Well, let’s do red. We’re going to do a comma, white, black, and say green. So now this is going to generate different variables, and it’s going to generate versions with the red shirt, a white shirt, black shirt, green shirt. And notice it also got some other settings here that we can change here. We can change the aspect ratio. So if we wanted more square, we could grab it there. We can use a reference image here. With this, we can go into effects here. So we want photo or art. We’re going to choose photo. And you’ve We’ve seen some of these before. Maybe we’ll do something cinematic. And now we’re going to hit Generate, and now it’s going to generate 16 different images, but they’re going to happen quickly because it’s in the fast mode.

But notice this. This saves you time when you’re experimenting, you’re trying some different things. And as we can see here, we got some red shirts, some white shirts. That’s not a T-shirt, but that’s all right. We got black, green. And as you can see now, we’re getting a bunch of variations in there We’re using these variables. And this can just save a whole ton of time. Now, I could have a woman in the mall. I could create another variable, a man. I could change the mole. I could do another variable. Let’s do this. And this is I’m going to do it manually. Let’s do Beach. And I’m just going to do one variation so it doesn’t get too nuts. And let’s just get rid of the… Well, we’ll do red and white just to speed up so we don’t get too many variables because otherwise it will generate all of these, but it’s going to take a while. So now we’re getting 16. So now we’re going to get the woman with the red shirt at the beach and at the mall. And we’re going to get a woman with a white shirt at the beach and at the mall.

And here we go. There she is with the white shirt. She’s at the mall. Now she is at the white shirt. She’s at the beach. Red shirt at the mall, red shirt at the beach. And so I think you get the general idea of how this can save us time. And I’ll do a a dedicated tutorial on this when we dig into a lot more of the options more in-depth. So I hope you enjoyed this video to give you an introduction to the new features. Keep your eyes open for more in-depth videos from me on some of these features and drop a comment. Let me know what is your favorite new feature, and what features would you love to see me dig more in-depth and just really dig into them and go deep with them. And by the way, if you’re new, welcome to the cafe. This is Photoshop Cafe. I’m Colin. Welcome. Hit that subscribe button, turn on notifications, and you won’t miss any of my tutorials. And until next time, I’ll see you at the cafe.

The post Photoshop 2025 New Features appeared first on PhotoshopCAFE.

Here are some other tuts on making the selections.

1. Combining Photos for Beginners
2. How to use Select and Mask
3. How to make auto ai selections in Photoshop
4. How to cut out hair and Fur in Photoshop

OK, on with our tips.

1. Visualizing pixels in an image

When you have the animated marching ants selection, you can see where the pixels are.

Once you add a mask, it can be difficult to see the pixels and transparency.

Choose the fx in the layers panel and add a stroke.

Make it a color that is easy to see, like red

Now you can clearly see the areas that you need to clean up.

2. Removing Colored Edges

Sometimes when you cut out an object, you can see a colored edge. This is usually left over background color, known as a colored fringe.

With a selection tool active, choose Select and Mask from the top toolbar. (If you don’t see it, make sure a selection tool is the active tool, yup, that’s why I said that at the beginning of this sentence.)

3. Blending Edges into the image

Sometimes the edges look too sharp, or even a little serrated and we want to blend them into the background smoothly.

Here are the steps I take.

1. Make a selection active, marching ants, add a layer mask.
2. Inverse the selection, Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+I
3. Select>Modify>Expand, by 1 pixel
4. Select>Modify>Feather by 1 pixel

Now we have a single pixel soft selection inside the edge.

With the Layer Mask Selected, Paint over the edge and see how nice it looks!

If you want to see the edge while painting, Press Cmd/Ctrl+H to hide the selection. The selection is still working, you just can’t see it.

4. moving mask edges. Choking the mask

Sometimes you have a visible edge and maybe you want to contract the mask to hide that edge. In select and Mask, you can use the slider to expand/contract the edge. But this old school tip gives you more control.

With your selection as a mask. Always make a mask out of your selection, never hit the delete key. Why? For a start, you can’t do any of these modifications without a mask.

Click on the Layer mask and choose filter>Blur and apply a small Gaussian blur. You are blurring the mask, not the photo. I zoomed in on the next image which is why it looks blurry now. Just the edge should actually be blurry.

Press Ctrl/Cmd+L for levels. or make a levels adjustment layer.

Notice as you move the black and white sliders you get a nice crisp edge. As you move the gray slider, you can move the edge itself. Move its until the fringe disappears and you have a perfect mask edge.

5. Cleaning up a mask

There are times when there are lots of little spots on your mask, almost like snow, these are left over pixels from certain selection tools.

You can paint them away manually, or you can use this tip to get a head start and fix most of them.

This is actually very similar to the previous tip, but we are working on the mask area, rather than the edge.

Choose the mask. (watch the video to see how to do it, if you don’t know).

Choose Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur

Choose small Radius

With the Mask selected, choose Ctrl/Cmd+L for levels.

Move the Left, black slider in Levels to clean up the blacks, the white dots and gray will begin to disappear.

As you move the white, right slider you will notice the whites begin to blend together and the black dots disappear,

You may still have to do a little manual brushing, but a lot of the cleanup work is handled by Levels.

And you get a nice clean mask, any leftover parts can be fixed with a black or white bush on the mask.

Alright, I hope you find these tips helpful

Colin

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The selection brush tool, is a tool that makes selections. Unlike the other selection tools, you just brush this on like a paintbrush, it’s very easy to use. If you have used the selection brush and know Photoshop fairly well, you will notice it’s similar to Quick Mask. If you have never used the selection brush, it’s ok, we will go through ti here along with all its features. We will also look at quick mask and suggest which is the best way to go for different tasks.

How to use the Selection Brush Tool

Choose the tool from the toolbar.

Paint. You will see a colored brush stroke.

When you choose a different tool, the colored stroke will turn into a selection.

If you choose the Selection tool again, the selection will turn into the brush stoke once again.

When the selection is active, it’s the same as any selection. You can combine it with other selection tools.

Hold Shift to add to the selection. Hold Alt/Option to remove from the selection.

When you are in the Brush tool, also

Size Hold Alt/Option to remove from the selection.

When you choose the setection tool, the selection will turn back to the colored strokes.

Shortcuts or hotkeys help. (L-key), chooses the selection tool, choose another tool, like move tool (V-Key) to toggle a selection.

There are 2 brush settings

Size ( [ or ] bracket keys)

Hardness (Shift + [ or] brackets)

Being able to create a soft edges selection is unique to this tool. (and Quick Mask, we will discuss soon)

Using the Selection Brush Tool

Lets remove a distraction from the photo.

You can paint freehand to make a selection. Or use this trick to paint straight lines quickly.

With the tool selection, click at the start point.

Release

Hold Down Shift

(Still holding Shift), Click at the end of the line

A line will be drawn between the 2 points.

I used that trick to select the steel girder.

Click on Generative Fill in the Contextual Task Bar.

Leave it blank and click Generate.

The distraction has been removed.

Using the Selection Brush tool with Density

Let’s make a little art using the density art trick. Learn how to make art with ai and density in Photoshop here

Lower the brush Opacity to around 20%

Choose a different overlay color. Here we chose Green.

Paint over the portion of the image you want to change.

In the task bar, click Generate and then enter something like oil painting, or watercolor in the prompt and click on Generate.

You get an oil painting effect

Lower the Opacity of the layer to make the effect more subtle.

Cutting Out tress with Selection Brush and Quick Mask

A difficult task for many people is cutting out trees. I have tutorials on removing background from trees. 

Without going through all the steps. They are on the video at the top.

Choose Select>Color Range

Use the eyedropper to select the sky.

Use the + eyedropper to add to the selection

Move fuzziness to get the best isolation of the selected area.

Click ok

You get a selection of the sky.

Cmd+Shift+I to inverse the selection.

Choose the selection Brush. See the overlay.

Paint on the areas that got missed.

Go back to a selection.

You may notice, it’s really hard to see the tiny areas that are missed in the field.

Ok, here’s a better way. Continuing where we are.

Using Quick Mask to refine selections

With the marching ants selection active, Click on the Quick Mask tool, to press the Q key.

You will see a similar overlay, but probably a different color than Selection Brush.

If you double click the Quick Mask tool, you will see you can choose any color and also opacity.

Now with 100% opacity, it’s easier to see the missed areas than with the Selection Brush.

But, it gets even better.

Open the Channels and notice the Quick Mask channel has been created.

Turn off the visibility eye from RGB

Now you can see a black and white mask.

Paint with black and white to clean up the mask. Much easier now. You can also combine other selection tools inside Quick mask.

Press the Q key to go back to a selection. Just like the Selection Brush, you toggle between a selection and painting.

The Quick Mask tool also lets you use any brush you like as well as supporting Pen Pressure.

Quick Mask is more powerful, and is my choice. If you are newer, you may find the Selection Brush easier. So you have options. The selection brush is sometimes quicker for quick fixes and selecting things to use with generative fill.

I have a few tutorials on How to use Quick Mask, here is one. 

Just to finish our task. If you click the mask icon to hide the background we can see the quality of our selection.

I dropped a blue solid behind it to let you see the quality of the cutout.

This is the same image, but using Select Sky. As you can see the other method is more work, but a better result.

I hope you found this week’s free tutorial useful.Thanks

Colin

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If you watch the video, you’ll see a basic explanation of how it works as well as how to change the color of an object and all the steps to paint the highlights Im showing you in this tip.

Change type of Adjustment layer in Photoshop

Here is a composite I made with talented musician, Taylor Davis as the model. I turned her violin bow into a magic wand kind of a bow and added a glow to it. In order for it to look better, we will add a highlight to her jacket, but also color that highlight.

Be aware, I’m just choosing something to show how it works and you could use this for a variety of different things, let your imagination soar.

Create a curves adjustment layer and brighten up the image. (All steps in video at top).

Choose the Mask and Cmd/Ctrl+I to invert and fill with black. This hides the adjustment.

We will paint back to adjustment just where we want it to make the new highlight.

Choose a brush, and set it to white as the foreground color and paint on the areas to add the highlight reflection.

You can see how the jacket, violin and surrounding areas look  more realistic now.

This is what the mask looks like after painting.

Here’s the thing. I want to add a colored layer and paint on the same areas and don’t want to reproduce the mask again. (Yes, I can alt/Option drag the mask to replicate it, use a clipping group, or apply the mask to a group. But we are doing it this way, so I can show you the tip that you can apply to all kinds of scenarios. Also this methods is really fast once you get used to it.).

Press Ctrl/Cmd+J to duplicate the adjustment layer

The problem is, it’s a curves adjustment and we want it to be a hue/saturation adjustment instead.

We can’t change this in the Layers panel anymore. Here’s the tip.

Choose the Adjustment Brush for a moment (we won’t paint with it).

Look at the Contextual Task Bar (it has to be here, this won’t work on the main toolbar art the top) and see curves.

Click on Curves and change it to Hue/Saturation.

Notice, it updates the Adjustment Layer type! Personally, I think this is really cool.

Change the hue adjustment to change the color to blue.

I hope you found this little tip useful. Will you use it every day? Probably not, but now you have it under your belt for when you do need it.

Thanks

Colin

PS Don’t forget to follow us on Social Media for more tips..

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The post Photoshop tip. Change Adjustment Layer type in Photoshop appeared first on PhotoshopCAFE.

In some cases, these features have already appeared in the beta version of Photoshop and I have already made tutorials on them. In those cases, I’ll provide a brief overview of the feature here, so this tutorial is complete. I will also provide a link to th more in-depth tutorial, so you can learn the feature in more detail.

Selection Brush Tool

This feature is entirely new(ish). While it’s a new feature, the Selection Brush is just basically a dumbed down version of Quick Mask.

You use the selection Brush, to paint on a selection. When you choose another tool, the painted area will be turned into a section. What makes this tool unique, is its ability to create a soft edged selection, and also with a different level of transparency. (This can also be done with Quick Mask, but with more control). The selection brush has no edge detection and works like a paintbrush.

The Selection Brush is nested with the lasso tool.

At the top, you can chan choose transparency as well as brush softness.

Paint on the image where you want to make a selection.

If you choose a different tool, the pink area will turn into a section.

In this case, lets do something more interesting to highlight the soft edges selection.

Click on new layer mask

A mask is created with a soft edge and also semi transparent.

You can see this makes in interesting looking mask.

Let’s inverse the mask, Click on the layer masks

Ctrl/Cmd+I to invert it.

Choose another image and drag it into the tab on the image we are working on.

This enables us to combine images into a collage. See how the soft edges selection works in this case.

Here is a basic tutorial on combining images and making collages in photoshop if you don’t know how to do this.

Using the Selection Brush with Generative Fill

Here is a more useful way to use the selection brush.

Lower the opacity to 20%

Paint in the area you want to generate a shark.

In the Contextual Task Bar, type in Shark and click Generate.

Because the Brush opacity was reduced to 20% it generates a low density, making the shark appear underwater.

In my opinion, this tool is a bit redundant and you are better off learning how to use Quick mask Tool. But it’s easy for beginners, who may get some use out of it.

Adjustment Brush updates

I have made tutorials on the Photoshop Adjustment Brush before. But is has some updates here.

First, it’s been places into its own slot in the toolbar. It used to be nested with the Brush tool. The problem with the nesting, when you tap the B key for Brush, you would get the Adjustment brush instead of the paintbrush and this messed up workflows, as well as actions.

Now you have options in the Taskbar including Brush hardness and size. (I’m still hoping for pen pressure).

Paint on your photo to apply the adjustment.

To be a little blunt, I sort of Group this tool with the Selection brush, a bit redundant for users other than new users, as the Adjustment Layer Masks can do the same thing with more control.

But here is a different way the Adjustment Brush works that is useful.

If you want to extend the adjustment, choose the Object selection tool and make a selection.(You can see this on the video at the top).

The adjustment is automatically extended to the selected area.

Shapes, strokes and fill

The shape tools have a boost and the features are available in the Task Bar, making this once-annoying floating bar a little more useful and endearing itself with more users. Let me know in the comments, do you like the task bar?

Grab the rectangular shape tool. Make sure you have shape as the option at the top left of the top toolbar.

Make a selection.

Notice you can change the fill and stoke colors, as well as change the roundness by dragging on the dots in the corners.

Tap the curve in the task bar and notice you can also change the corner roundness here.

If you desire, you can change the roundness of individual corners.

Bullets and Numbering

This simple feature appears to be the favorite of a lot of people, myself included.

When you make text lists, you had to manually create bullets with the circle tool and align them to the image. No longer!

With the type tool active, Click the tool options.

Look at the bottom left corner of the Paragraph panel.

Make sure you select your type first.

Click on Bullets and lookie!

It’s small, but huge at the same time and long overdue.

If you chose numbers, it will add a numbered list, or convert the bullets to numbers.

Enhance image on Generative Fill

When you use Generative fill, you get a maximum resolution of 1024px x 1024px stretched out over the Generated area. This tool is added from Photoshop beta and now in shipping version.

If the generated area is larger than 1k, you will see an icon in the variation Thumbnail. Click this to enhance the appearance of the generated pixels.

I have created and entire tutorial on Enhancing resolution on Generative Fill, where I show you exactly what this does and how it works, as well as tips to boost the resolution in any generated image.

Text To image, Generate Image

This next feature, is also moved over from Photoshop Beta, aka the real Version of Photoshop (Shipping? They don’t actually ship) or whatever we are calling the regular version of Photoshop.

At the bottom of the toolbar you will see a new icon. If the icon is missing, here’s the fix

The new icon is for Generate Image, or Text to Image. You have to have a document open for this to work. If it’s grayed out, create a new document first, or open an existing one.

Here you can generate images from text prompts and they are using Adobe Firefly version 3.

I’m not going Ito this as I show how it works on the video, and I have previously made an in-detail tutorial on Photoshop Generative Image/ Text to Image. 

Hopefully this article was useful and helped you get up to date on the newest Photoshop Features. In case you didn’t know, I have an archive of ALL the Photoshop and Lightroom features as they were added in the Superguide. See what features you may have missed.

Great to see you at the CAFE

Colin

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This easy Photoshop tutorial, shows you the steps to combine photos and match the colors in Photoshop. We use Photoshop 2024 and this is suitable for beginners or newer users of Photoshop but it also contains some useful tips for all users.

How to Get Images into Photoshop

To get images into Photoshop, choose File Open

Navigate to the image you want to open, Select one or multiple images, and click Open.

You will see each image is open in its own tab.

How to Combine images in Photoshop

Let’s combine both these images into a single layered document.

Click and drag into the tab of the document that you want to move the image into.

Don’t let go of the mouse button.

Move to the middle of the image on the window that opens.

Hold Down the Shift Key (to center the image) and release

You will see that both images are in the same tab

Notice, they are on different layers (See more about layers here)

How to Remove the background of a photo in Photoshop

Now we want to remove the background on the top layer, so we can see the layer underneath

Choose the Quick Selection Tool

At the top, look for Elect Subject. Choose the Cloud option (better quality selection).

Click Select Subject

You should see the marching ants selection around the person.

To refine this selection, use the quick selection tool. By default it is set to add.

Drag with the tool to add to the selection.

Hold down Alt/Option and drag to take away from the selection.

Lets add the ground.

To amass this out and hide the background, either

Option 1.

Click the mask tool. or..

Option 2.

If you want to further refine the selection, click on Select and Mask.

You will now go to the select and masks workspace, which has lots of tools. Learn how to use Select and Mask in Photoshop here. 

Id you see a colored fringe around the image, choose decontaminate colors

Make sure Output is set to New Layer with Layer Mask

Click ok.

If you used option 1 o2, you should see th background hidden and our person against the city.

Use Ctrl+T and drag the corners to scale and move the image if you need to.

How to match colors between layers in Photoshop

Let’s match the colors now.

Choose the top Layer

Choose Image>Adjustments> Match Color

Under Source, choose the document.

You want the same name as the tab you are working in.

Under Layer, choose the layer you want the image to match to. In this case, it’s background.

You will see the colors change. (If not, turn the preview button on in the top right).

Choose fade, and move it to the right for the original color.

This is mainly the hue (but contrast is affected too) move it until the colors match the best

Drag the color intensity slider. Move it until the saturation matches.

Finally, move the Luminance slider until the brightness matches.

When you are happy with the settings, click Ok to apply

You should have a better match now. (Different way of matching colors in Photoshop)

Now, it’s time to blur the background for more realism. How much you blur this is up to you.

How to Blur the background of a photo in Photoshop

With the Background selected, right click and choose Convert to Smart Object. This will let us change the settings later if we want to.

Choose Filter>Blur Gallery>Field Blur

Move the ring to change the amount of blur. Or choose the blur slider at the top left. I used about 4pixels here for a very subtle effect.

Click ok to apply.

I hope you found this simple tutorial useful. There is a lot more you can do with this and I have hundreds of free Photoshop tutorials here at PhotoshopCAFE to help you do almost anything in Photoshop.

Check out the goodies at the vault below if you are new here, they will help you on your Photoshop journey.

Great to have you here!

Colin

PS Don’t forget to follow us on Social Media for more tips..

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This tutorial shows you how to paint on adjustments with pen pressure to add depth and drama to a photo in Photoshop 2024. For tips on using a Wacom tablet, check out these tips. 

This works like the Adjustment brush, but it’s a more advanced way to create this effect and gives us more control and power.

Lets start with this picture I shot, it is an interesting subject with a great sky. Its just a little flat. Lets fix it now.

How this works

We will make some adjustments to the image. These adjustments will be our “paint”.

We will hide all the Adjustments with a black mask.

Finally, we will paint with a white brush to add the adjustments exactly where we want them. By using Pen pressure, we can shade and blend the adjustment like we would with a pencil. This is my favorite way of working,

Choose new adjustment layer in the layers panel.

Grab a curves adjustment.

Increase the midtones and brights, we are looking to set the new maximum highlights.

See how the land is looking better. Yes, the sky is blown out, but don’t worry. We won’t be applying this adjustment to the entire image, just certain area.

Add a second adjustment layer. This time, Vibrance.

Add a third, levels adjustment.

(Despite what some people say, Levels has a very valid use alongside curves, it gives a linear midtone /highlight boost, that’s hard to accomplish with curves without introducing banding).

Now we have several adjustments, lets combine then together into a “super adjustment” that we can paint onto our image.

Click, Ctrl+Click on each layer to select all three.

Press Ctrl/Cmd+G to group the Adjustments together.

Click the layer mask icon to add a layer mask to the group.

Click the mask to select it. Press Cmd/Ctrl+I to invert your mask.

(If you hold down the alt/Option key as you create the mask, it will make a black mask).

The Adjustment will now be hidden because of the black mask. The image should look like the original again.

Choose the brush tool and a soft edged brush. Set foreground color to white.

Click the brush options

Under transfer, choose Pen Pressure for opacity jitter. This will only be available if you are using a pressure sensitive pen and tablet, such as a Wacom, Xence, Microsoft Surface etc. When you press harder, the effect will be stronger than when you brush lightly.

You can still adjust your images without a tablet, just use a lower opacity, you obviously won’t be able to use pen pressure.

Optional: You can use selection tools such as object selection to isolate regions that you will paint.

In this case, I selected the rock, because I want to constrain the brush strokes to the structure and not on the water. We will use different strokes on the water.

Paint the areas that will be facing the sun to accentuate the highlights and add depth to the image. It’s like painting with light.  See the video at the top to see this in action.

Add more highlights on the ocean by gently brushing with the pen.

If you want to increase the effect, duplicate the adjustment group by clicking it in the layers panel and pressing Ctrl/Cmd+J.

Here we have painted on highlights. Lets also do some shadow.

To set up a shadow adjustment.

Click the New Layer icon while holding down alt/Option.

This gives us a dialog box, change it to overlay mode.  This will hide gray.

Here is our new adjustment, notice its overlay blend mode. Understand Layer Blend modes in Photoshop here.

This time, choose a brush and set foreground color to black.

Paint on the shadows to chisel some depth into the image. If you like this look and want a deeper walkthrough step-by-step, check out my course on dodge and burn in Photoshop, it will transform your images!

The tablet used in this video, Wacom Intuos Pro Medium

I hope you found this tutorial useful! Check out our other tutorials here at the CAFE, there are over 800 free Photoshop tutorials here.

Colin

PS Don’t forget to follow us on Social Media for more tips..

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The post How to edit a photo in Photoshop using Pen Pressure & Wacom Tablet appeared first on PhotoshopCAFE.

You may be aware of the Adjustment brush added in Photoshop 2024. It does the same thing as an Adjustment Layer and painting on the mask. Its easier and quicker to use, especially for newer Photoshop users. This new feature added a lot of usefulness to this tool, where even advanced users may see this as a worthwhile shortcut. Let look at it now.

Adjusting an object within a photo. Brighten a person.

Let’s brighten the woman in this photo. This example will allow you to see how this tool works.

Choose the Adjustment Brush from the toolbox. Can’t find the adjustment brush? Here is the fix.

Click on the adjustment in the toolbar at the top, to choose an adjustment.

Choose Exposure.

Click the icon to turn on object selection.

As you roll over different parts of the image, you will see different objects highlighted. Sometimes, it will show the whole person, other times, part of the person.

To select a highlighted area, click.

Notice the adjustment is applied as a new Adjustment Layer and a Layer Mask is created for the selected area.

Make adjustments in the Properties panel to adjust the masked part of the photo.

Adding to the selection with the Adjustment Brush in Photoshop

Notice the woman is adjusted, but her backpack doesn’t match the photo, because it wasn’t part of the selection mask,

With the Adjustment Brush still selected, click on the Object Selection button in the top toolbar, and then, roll over the backpack.

Click to select.

Notice it’s added to the mask and takes on the adjustments immediately, because it’s part of the same mask.

Changing the background color of a photo in Photoshop with the Adjustment Brush.

Let’s look at a different example, so we can use the tool in a different way. We will change the background color.

Choose the Adjustment Brush, as before.

Choose Hue/Saturation as the Adjustment type.

Click the Object selection option in the toolbar.

As you roll overe the image, notice different parts are highlighted.

What we want to do, is select the entire foreground in a single selection. We can’t do this by rolling over in this case.

Instead go to the taskbar (I positioned the taskbar by the top toolbar here).

Choose Apply To Object. (If you are confused, see the video at the top).

With Apply to Object, drag to make a selection around the entire are we want to select.

It nicely makes a selection and masks it out.

You can add to the mask, or remove from the mask, using selection tools, or the black or white brush. How to use layer masks in Photoshop.

Let’s inverse (swap) the selection, so that the background will be selected, instead of the foreground.

Press Cmd+I (Ctrl+I Windows).

Adjust the hue in the properties panel to change the color.

I hope this tutorial helped you see how to use the Object Selection tools built into the Adjustment Brush in Photoshop. It’s always good to know different ways to do things.

Thanks for checking out this week’s Photoshop tutorial.

Colin

PS Don’t forget to follow us on Social Media for more tips..

• Instagram
• Youtube.
• facebook
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(I've been posting some fun Instagram and Facebook Stories lately)
You can get my free Layer Blending modes ebook along with dozens of exclusive Photoshop Goodies here

The post Photoshop 2024 Adjustment brush gets auto selections, how do partial adjustments on photos the easy way appeared first on PhotoshopCAFE.